Registered: Jun 2001
Location: San Diego, CA, USA
Posts: 16

Maxtor Drive utilities.

I upgraded my TiVo with two 100 gig drives. I've noticed some problems now and then. Such as Internal errors, I've never seen before. I opened up my TiVo and felt the hard drives, the drive directly in front of the fan felt fine, the drive off to the side felt fairly hot. Nearly burning temperature. The System Information reports the temperature at 38 degrees (Normal). But as we all know that means very little.

What I want to know is this: Are there any Maxtor disk utilities that will check whether the drive has gone bad without altering the contents of the drive?

I've got no 100 gig drive in my pc, so I can't dd the drive contents to back it up. And as you can imagine my 200 gig unit is quite full with recordings, and I really don't want to lose them. It would be one very long exhausting weekend to try to watch everything on there. And recording it all onto Video would be about as good as throwing it away.


So to reiterate, are there any disk utilities I can run to check the status of the drive that won't compromise the data?

Joseph Elwell.

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For all your TiVo headlines
http://209.240.143.10/

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Registered: Nov 2000
Location: South of Boston, MA
Posts: 1271

Check out PowerMax

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Philips TiVo 312-03 30 hour
2.0.1-002-000

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Registered: Mar 2000
Location: Valencia, Ca
Posts: 221

You can try PowerMax. Unfortunately, my experience is that every disk diagnostic utility I've tried virtually never tells you about anything other than catastrophic surface problems (bad sectors, etc). They will NOT tell you when the disk is operating marginally.

I've had to replace my 80gb maxtor twice now. When the first one went bad, the stutters became painfully noticeable. You could hear the drive heads clicking when they encountered surface problems.

So I plugged it into a PC and ran PowerMax. The drive audibly struggled. After it was over, what did PowerMax say? "Your drive is factory certified in good condition". Geez. That makes me feel REAL confident about Maxtor's quality standards.

IBM's "Drive fitness utility" is just about as useless. With my bad 45gb drive, it kept informing me of bad sectors. It just kept telling me to reinitialize the disk (presumably to mark the sectors as bad). Of ourse, that didn't work too well since it'd always find more bad sectors. With the drive I got on replacement, there was clearly something wrong with it also. I heard funny noises from the heads. DFT said it was fine. A couple days later, it died completely. I now trust my ears more than DFT.

I have a couple other upgraded TiVos with similar 80gb maxtor drives with no problem so far. I hope they keep going. My confidence with large drive technology is pretty awful right now.

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