Disk About to Fail ?

[Glesgie]

I have 2 TiVos, both with identical hacks (Endpad,TivoWeb, dail mail, autospace, cron).

One works fine, no glitches.

The other glitches at infrequent intervals when watching recorded programs.
The glitch takes the form of the playback skipping a second or so of video and sound. Usually enough to miss one or two words of dialogue.
If I press replay it replays the section that glitched WITHOUT A GLITCH.
Sometimes the glitches are a few minutes apart, sometimes an hour
goes by without a glitch.

Very occasionally (weeks apart) this TiVo will reboot.

The disks were upgraded in March 2001, so nearly 4.5 years of
continuous use.

1. Does this sound like an impending disk failure ?

2. What should I look for in and in which log files that might help ?

All suggestions appreciated.

[mrtickle]

Wow, March 2001 - you must have been one of the pioneer upgraders.

You could try smartctl (the SMART reporting tool). There is an ancient version included on your tivo, or you can get a much newer version compiled for TiVo from somwhere (can't remember where, but you could try this one:
http://www.tivocommunity.com/tivo-vb/showthread.php?t=156288&page=1&pp=10 )

[Rob Nespor Bellis]

Heck Mr. T. I can beat that :D My TiVo had the cover off before I even turned it on for the first time.

Otoh I am just about to replace the disks from that first upgrade the A: 80GB drive has 3 bad sectors on it.

Rgds,

R.

[warrenrb]

Hi Glesgie,

I've been experiencing these problems myself recently. At first I put it down to the stream from the NTL box, but then I noticed it on old recordings that had been fine before.

Did you ever get this resolved? Did the drive fail?

I did a SMART check, and it seems OK.

One thing I did wonder was if something I have running on Tivo (like Endpad for example) was being a bit agressive with the processor cycles, and causing it every so often. I've tried rebooting the tivo, but this hasn't helped it. I have had endpad for quite a while, without any great problems.

Is there a way to check background task activity etc? Like a performance monitor of some kind?

[Glesgie]

Unlikely to be the hacks causing the problem.

Like you I did a SMART check and the drives passed, but when I did a mfsbackup and
restore to a new pair of drives it had to retry quite a few times. So much so that
I started to think the drives had died, but it completed eventually.

After getting the new drives to work, I tested the old drives with spinrite and sure
enough it detected bad sectors.

Disks are so cheap now that I would recommend swapping out the (probably failing) disk.