Save a failing drive?

[sandiegoguy]

My beloved 60 hour Series 2 is failing, and won't stay on more than 45 minutes or so without rebooting. I believe the problem is a dying hard drive, but I don't want to lose the 40 hours of programming I haven't watched yet, so I'm going to attempt to transfer the data onto a new drive. I figure while I'm at it I should upgrade to at least an 80 if not a 120 gig drive.

I'm attempting to follow along in the Hindsdale How-to, but I'm a bit unclear on whether I should follow Step 7 Option 3 (COPYING TiVo DRIVE TO NEW UPGRADE DRIVE) using "dd if=/dev/hdc of=/dev/hdb bs=1024k", or Step 10 Configuration 3 which uses "mfsbackup -Tao - /dev/hdc | mfsrestore -s 127 -xzpi - /dev/hda", or if I need to do both.

If I'm understanding the instructions correctly, once I get the old and the new drives connected to the PC, then I just need to run the one mfsbackup | mfsrestore command and then put the new drive back in the TiVo.

But don't I also need to run mfsadd at some point? Or will mfsadd kill my existing recordings?

Thanks for any enlightenment you can provide.

[HomeUser]

Use Step 10 mfsbackup| mfsrestore it is quicker and safer. The -x adds the partitions no need to run mfsadd.

Have you checked the fan your TiVo could be overheating.

[Dkerr24]

As cheap as drives are, I'd go bigger than a 120gb. I bought a 300gb Samsung drive for $99. Most 80 to 120gb drives will cost $60 to $80 anyway.

[sandiegoguy]

The machine is not running too hot, and I'm still on 7.2.1, so I don't think I'm hit with that bug. I'm going to attempt to copy to a new drive tonight, but I fear that if my existing drive is having issues, then my new copy will also have issues. Any advice on doing a repair as I copy?

[HomeUser]

There is a program called dd_rescue (http://www.garloff.de/kurt/linux/ddrescue/) that can ignore read errors when copying.

For recovery SpinRite can sometimes recover the data on a TiVo drive long enough to copy a little costly however see http://grc.com