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View Full Version : Drive Failures and other oddities...


SJAndrew
06-17-2006, 11:51 PM
About 6 months ago, my original TiVo drive died. I sent my box back to TiVo for a replacement.

While waiting weeks and weeks for my unit to return, I found this forum and learned what I could to perform a capacity upgrade on my unit (series 2 TiVO box, TCD24008A).

At the time, the best buy I could get on new hard drives was a Hitachi 250GB drive. I bought two and upgraded from 80 -> 500GB.

The process was pretty painless except for the crappy Hitachi drives. I bought two from NewEgg and had to eventually return both, they crashed and failed Hitachi's drive fitness test.

I received two RMA units (free of charge) from NewEgg. Eventually, I had to return these two drives too - same deal.

The third time was the charm. The 5th and 6th drives I received worked fine...until this Thursday.

Then, this (http://home.comcast.net/~sjandrew.storage/hitachi.jpg) happened. I was lucky to be home as this could have started a fire.

I checked the other drive on the data chain and it's not even seen by the BIOS of my various PC's. So, that's 6 Hitachi 250GB drives that have bit the dust. Numbers 7 and 8 are on the way (thanks NewEgg).

For what it's worth don't buy hitachi drives. I've used and liked them going back to the IBM days. I even had a deathstar without incident. Their drives now, from my experience at least, leave a lot to be desired.

Now, onto the second part of my "story". I have put back my original 80GB Maxtor drive back into my unit as I await new drives. When I did, I spent hours with service updates. As such, I thought it would be a good idea to rip another image so I don't have to do this again when I get my new drives.

So, I did this exactly as before without incident. And, to be safe, I took another 80GB drive I have as a spare. I tried restoring this image to this spare 80GB drive with MFSTools gives me an inadequate capacity error. I'm not sure how this is possible considering both drives are 80GB drives.

Is it possible that my spare 80GB drive (about 1-2 years older than the Maxtor drive in my TiVo) is like 0.001% smaller and causing MFSTools to give me this error? I would rather not keep my OEM Maxtor drive in my TiVo for any longer than necessary.

litzdog911
06-18-2006, 02:58 AM
....
Is it possible that my spare 80GB drive (about 1-2 years older than the Maxtor drive in my TiVo) is like 0.001% smaller and causing MFSTools to give me this error? I would rather not keep my OEM Maxtor drive in my TiVo for any longer than necessary.

Yes, very possible. When MFSTools identifies the drives during boot up, you should be able to see the exact drive sizes. You need to use a drive EXACTLY the same size, or larger.

c3
06-18-2006, 03:34 AM
Maxtor drives are usually larger than non-Maxtor drives of the "same" capacity.

SJAndrew
06-18-2006, 04:15 AM
Cool - thanks guys.

I suppose it's not that big of a deal as I'm only using this OEM Maxtor drive until my replacement Hitachi drives arrive from RMA. I've already extracted the image, plus I still have the image I extracted (and I know works) 6 months ago.

I just have very little confidence in Maxtor drives, so I don't want to run it any longer than necessary.