Replacing a drive and saving recordings

[scsiguy72]

I upgraded my Hughes Dtivo a few years ago to a 300 Gig drive using the >137 Gig support boot disk. Now my drive is starting to fail and my Tivo skips while watching recordings or Live TV. When it skips I can hear the HD click, so I know it is going south.

Question is this:

Can I get a new drive say 400 or 500 Gig and move all my recordings to the newer bigger drive (was it using the DD command?) If the drive is starting to fail that means it has bad sectors on it. Will the programs copy?

Also I have about 250 hours of programs, will it take overnight or just a hour or so to copy them?

[RoundBoy]

as I found from wonderful people here :

use the command : hdparam -d1 -c3 -i1 /dev/hdx

for each drive. This enables DMA / 32 bit transfer in sync mode / irq sharing..

It increased my copy speed 600% ..

it did about 1gb in less then a minute. Your milage will vary, but I expect if you did a full image transfer, you could accomplish it in less then 2 hrs start to finish.

[wscannell]

You will not be able to expand the hard drive a second time and save the programs. So do not buy a drive larger than you need. You will need a drive that has at least as many sectors as your current drive. (All 300 GB drives do not have the same number of sectors.) You probably will be better with a 320GB, then you will know there is enough space for the copy.

The copy may take overnight. In fact it can take even longer depending on how many errors the drive gets. You can use dd to copy the drive. If this gets errors, you may need to use dd_rescue that handles the errors better.