replacing bad drive, is it a bad idea to copy stuff to the new drive?

[Leila]

I have a 500GB Seagate drive in a HR10. It's a rather old drive and lately seems to be going bad. so I figured I should just replaced the drive, either the same 500gb or a bigger 750gb drive. there are at least a couple dozen programs that I want to transfer to the new drive, but I was wondering if this is a bad idea. is it possible that the old drive will have some corrupted data, and that it may get end up on the new drive?
thanks!

[litzdog911]

If the old drive is still working fine then you should have no problems copying and preserving your recordings onto the new drive.

[GreenLantern]

wow, 500GB. how much of it contains programs that you are going to copy? i just replaced a failing hard drive for a Series 1 and a 70GB transfer ran for 13 hrs (using MFSTools 2.0 with DMA enabled on a P4 2.4GHz PC). i don't know if there is a way to selectively copy a subset of programs, or if my transfer was abnormally slow, but if you've got a few hundred GB to copy then you might be waiting a long time...

on the plus side, all the data transferred successfully, despite the fact that the TiVo couldn't play back some of the recordings withut stuttering/freezing. those same recordings played fine after being transferred to the new drive.

[blindlemon]

MFSTools copies every recording stream even if it has been deleted from the Now Playing list.

If you have network access you should use my PurgeDeleted script (http://www.tivocommunity.com/tivo-vb/showthread.php?p=4416485#post4416485) to clear out the deleted streams prior to doing the upgrade.

[Leila]

I just finished copying the old 500gb
to the new 500gb drive. Had roughly
30 to 40 hours of HD program on the
old drive. Not sure exactly how long it
took, but must have been almost an
entire day. I just left the PC running...
Will a newer PC make the copying
process go a lot faster next time?
(my current PC is an old Sony Vaio,
Pentium D 2.8Ghz, 2GB RAM)

The new drive was definitely a lot
quieter. It's the same exact model
as the old one, so I assume the old
one was definitely going bad...

[ronsch]

You can also use dd_rescue if you aren't going to expand to a larger drive. It will do that same copy in a fraction of the time and zero out unreadable blocks in the process.