Help - Hard drive failing!

[Jhigginson]

Hi all,

My Tivo has started to hang and stutter during playback and having searched through these forums it sounds like the hard drive is starting to fail. I have two questions:

1. Is there any way to save/transfer the existing recordings onto a new hard drive?

2. Can I still use the failing hard drive to make a new one using Hinsdale's instructions or should I use a fresh image? I'm afraid of transfering the errors onto the new drive?.

Thanks,

John

[blindlemon]

Yes, it sounds like a drive problem.

Yes, you can use Hinsdale to transfer to a new drive and, if your existing drive has < 3 MFS partition pairs you can upgrade to a bigger drive at the same time and keep your recordings. If you go for a drive > 120gb then you will need to use the LBA48 CD (http://www.tivoheaven.com/download/ptv-mfstools2-large-disk.iso) and run copykern afterwards to copy the kernel and initialise the new, bigger (1mb per 2GB drive capacity) swapfile.

So long as your current drive works (after a fashion) then you don't need to worry unduly about copying corruption as whatever corruption there is is probably only in the affected video files which can be deleted. Might be worth forcing a GSOD after the copy though to ensure that any MFS corruption is nipped in the bud...

[Jhigginson]

Blindlemon,

Many thanks for the reply. How do I find out if my existing drive has < 3 MFS partition pairs and how do I force a GSOG?

Thanks,

[blindlemon]

What is your current drive configuration?

If it is an original 40GB then you're fine (1 partition), an original 30+15GB not upgraded, or a 40GB upgraded to any size single drive in one go, also fine (2 partitions).

Any other combination is likely to have 3 partitions already, in which case you will have to dump your recordings or go for a twin drive upgrade, possibly keeping your "A" drive the same size as current.

You can force a GSOD from a bash prompt with mfsassert -please, or with the remote using kickstart codes (http://alt.org/wiki/index.php/TivoDiagnostics) 57 or 58.

[mikerr]

If copying the drive with recordings be aware it can take in excess of 24 hours to complete for even a 40gb drive !!!

Mine copied ok, but I was totally unprepared for it to take so long
- I used my main PC, so it tied it up for a day/night/ half the next day :eek:

A normal copy for just settings and season passes etc is just ten minutes.

[blindlemon]

it can take in excess of 24 hours to complete for even a 40gb drive !!!Blimey! What were you using to do the copy - a TiVo? :p:D:D

IME it normally takes around 3-4 hours to copy a 40GB drive on my rather slow (Pentium 1, 166) "upgrade" PC with just 96mb of RAM, so I would suspect your source drive had loads of errors to take that long.

[Jhigginson]

What is your current drive configuration?


Its an original 40Gb single drive upgraded to a single 120Gb so I should be OK.

Many thanks for the help.

[Jhigginson]

You can force a GSOD from a bash prompt with mfsassert -please, or with the remote using kickstart codes (http://alt.org/wiki/index.php/TivoDiagnostics) 57 or 58.
How long should a GSOD run if forced using kiststart code 57? Mine has now been running for almost 20 hours and I was just wondering if this is normal?

Thanks.

[blindlemon]

I would normally expect it to complete in an hour or less if there are no problems with the drive. 20 hours is too long for comfort.

Please note that my actual suggestion was to trigger a GSOD after doing the copy to a new drive, not before...