HD is dead :(

[meschen]

Power went out last night (probably due to PG&E work that is on-going near my home, but they won't own up to it). My Tivo came back up last night when power was restored, and was working normally. But today it died and its stuck on the welcome screen.

It now occured to me that this is my second apparant HD failure, so its possible the fault lies elswhere. The first HD lasted just 5 months, and showed signs of trouble before dying. This one lasted just under two years. I would like to blame PG&E, but it it wouldn't do me a bit of good. So I guess I have to move on.

Here's my question: assuming the HD is the problem, is there any hope of pulling the saved showes off of the unit? There are about 20 or 25 hours of programs I woudl really like to get back.

[classicsat]

There is a chance you can recover programs, using dd_rescue, to copy to another drive.

I think you ought to get a UPS.

[scottc42]

there are plenty of companies out there that specialize in data recovery, and I have hired them for some of my clients that may have suffered damaged computers due to a fire. However, this is pretty expensive and usually reserved for highly valuable company data.

[mackiedoo2]

I definitely sympathize with your plight meschen. I came back from a vacation all set to see what my TiVO had recorded and the hard drive was dead. I was trying to create a new image on a new hard drive today and my computer wouldn't co-operate in recognizing the PDTV Instantcake CD-ROM boot disk on the primary IDE interface so I'm going to have to buy a new TiVO. Pretty frustrating but it's taught me that I need to have a backup TiVO drive around just in case of disaster.

Sucks rocks.