Drive recovery woes

[MattTM]

I'll try to keep it short: It seems that the Maxtor 200GB drive in my TiVo failed, as it no longer makes it past "powering up" screen. I ordered a Western Digital 500GB drive to replace it with, but am having lots of trouble moving the data over from the Maxtor.

When the drive first stopped booting, I ran a scan with SeaTools. It warned of a SMART trip before the scan, and then immediately detected one error but no more. The scan ended and showed a nondescript error with only the number "0" shown. I selected to "repair" the error, but had no success booting afterward.

So I bought a new drive and immediately attempted a copy with mfsbackup/mfsrestore, only to receive some "no such file or directory" and "mfs_load_volume_header: mfsvol_read_data: Input/output error" errors. I assumed it was just refusing to read from the Maxtor because of whatever error there was at the beginning of the disk. I tried dd next and the copy succeeded, but the drive still didn't boot. I figured that whatever problem there was with the Maxtor drive was copied over.

Now, I've read every topic that I can find on this subject and not come up with a workable solution. I have the original 40GB hard drive as a backup that I could try copying, but I really want to restore my shows, since I have dozens of hours of unwatched programming, much of which is no longer airing. If anyone can provide some ideas or suggestions, they would be greatly appreciated.

[MattTM]

As is almost always the case, no more than 15 minutes after posting this topic, I started down a path that lead to the solution of my problem. Of course, I came to this only after posting here -- not in the prior days of pounding my head against the desk.

I was looking at WinMFS again (after ignoring it due to its inability to preserve recordings and my intention to keep my Windows desktop out of this whole mess) and noticed the "Restore Bootpage" function. I had suspected a bootpage issue all along, so I immediately downloaded WinMFS, threw the 500GB drive in my Windows case, and restored the bootpage... and it worked!

Now to determine the cleanest way to expand the drive to utilize all 500GB and I can get my TiVo back on its shelf where it belongs. I hope this will eventually be of some use to someone.

[ciper]

You may not be able to expand the drive again if you already expanded it before. In other words you might have to start with the 500gb drive blank and then use the add feature of winmfs

[MattTM]

You may not be able to expand the drive again if you already expanded it before. In other words you might have to start with the 500gb drive blank and then use the add feature of winmfs

I just went ahead and used the mfsadd feature of WinMFS and it seems to have worked perfectly. All 500GB are in use now and I was able to keep my recordings. :) :up: