Series2 (2 drives) HD Failure - Quickest restoration?

[Beretta1526]

My Series2 (TCD24004A) finally died last night after a few freezes over the last 6-7 months. It was upgraded quite some time ago with a second 120GB drive from Weaknees along with TwinBreeze and PowerTrip. I'm 98% certain that the primary 40GB drive (Maxtor Fireball 3 QuickView) has failed. I DREAD the thought of having to pull out my tower and start flipping hard drives around like burgers, but it seems that if I want to get something up and running TODAY, then I need to do that. I'm not concerned with any saved shows/movies, mostly my Season Passes and setup.

What I want to do is make sure I can't recover the original image from the primary drive through a repair first. If it may be recovered, I'd like to put that image on the newer drive (Maxtor DiamondMax 16 QuickView) - at least temporarily until I can get a new drive and get it set up with an image.
If I do the above, can I get away with using only the MFSLive tools, or do I need a mfr's drive tools to check the drive first?

If I cannot recover that image, will the appropriate InstantCake version restore it to the secondary drive for me without any other software?

UPDATE: I pulled all the Weaknees parts out (Power Trip, TwinBreeze, etc.) and did a check on the primary 40GB HD. It had so many errors on it that I had to cancel the scan. I'll deal with it later - maybe. I bought/downloaded InstantCake and put it on the secondary 120GB HD after running a check on it. I put it into Old Faithful and it started up, applied the pack/image, and now I just have to put in new programming info (I had written down all my SP's a little while back). I'm glad I had pulled all the stuff I really wanted to keep off it, and that doggone writer's strike actually worked to my advantage this time 'round. Thanks to all who have worked on all the hacks/tweaks/utilities for TiVo!

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[jerobi]

Beretta,

In the past I always took a similar route, trying for hours to save as much as possible. But when my secondary upgraded Series2 TiVo died recently (with its well-aged 40GB and 80GB drives), I took the fast route.

Here's my suggestion for the drive. Seagate DB35, well-reviewed for TiVos, very low price.
http://www.tivocommunity.com/tivo-vb/showthread.php?t=377308

This time I just bought a DB35, loaded a very old backup (losing a lot of my SPs), and ran WinMFS. I screwed it all back in and I was done and back up in less than an hour.

I figure with the time I saved between juggling drives and spending hours trying to rescue data, I could spend 20 minutes adding my SP's back. If you really want to be thorough, grab the drive after you finish adding SPs and make a backup in WinMFS for next time.

Oh, and you might want to try removing the PowerTrip first and see if your unit starts up. I was running one in each of my Series2 units for years. When the first Series2 died, it came back up and lived for another month or so ONLY AFTER I removed the PowerTrip from the equation - at the recommendation of several posters on this site. Now that both of my Series2 units are running single-drive 500GB Seagate DB35 drives, I don't have the PowerTrips in the units anymore.

Good luck!

[flatcurve]

Since the two drives were married, you won't be able to copy the image from the original 40gb to the newer drive and have it work, even if you can manage to do that with a dead drive. InstantCake will work on it's own without any additional software.

[Beretta1526]

Well, regardless of what I do, I will be eventually replacing the drive with a single 500GB drive, so I'm going to pull out the PowerTrip and TwinBreeze along with the second drive and see if it will boot up. If not, I'll pull the drive and put a new image on the 120GB drive.

If I use InstantCake, I can put an image on the 120GB drive, and MOVE it to the 500GB drive later, right?

EDIT: ALSO! I guess there's no support for using a USB --> IDE to image a drive for the TiVo?

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[classicsat]

IC probably added a 3rd set of media partitions. IC, for now, only supports direct IDE connections.

Next go, you will want to look into MFSLive. I believe it supports both expanding already expanded drives, and USB-IDE adapters.