Copied "Good" drive - Tivo won't boot

the_Skywise · 06-15-2007, 08:58 PM

've got a Directivo HDR-210 that had been acting flakey with video playback (getting video jitter/hiccups even when the sat was clear) and then a reboot in the middle of playback. Concerned that the drive might be going bad and with 320gb hard drives on sale this week I decided to make a backup.

Now I had already replaced the original drive with a 320gb about 2 years ago doing a straight disk copy (I don't get much HD and 200 hours of SD is more than enough for me!)

Got the MFStools 2.0 disk and did a dd to copy the drive. dd reported no errors.

Put the new drive in, get Welcoming, Powering up and... that's it.

Put the old drive back in, works fine.

So I went back and re-verified the new drive could handle the load. Both drives are WD and the same model and size (they're just manufactured about a year and a half apart), hdparm reports the same disk geometries for both.

Ran dd again. Again no errors from dd.

Put new drive back in and had the same result, Welcoming, Powering up and that's it.

(I triple checked the jumpers too!)

Is it possible I just purchased a bad drive?

funtoupgrade · 06-15-2007, 10:00 PM

Possible but not likely. If you have a good backup image you could try a restore first just to confirm the drive will work. I presume you have no jumper installed on the drive which is what you need.

the_Skywise · 06-15-2007, 10:14 PM

Quote:

Originally Posted by funtoupgrade

Possible but not likely. If you have a good backup image you could try a restore first just to confirm the drive will work. I presume you have no jumper installed on the drive which is what you need.

It's set for cable select which is what the original was. I'll try without here shortly.

I just tried doing a full backup again on a different PC(dd if=/dev/hda of=/dev/hdb bs=1024k) no errors from dd but the tivo still doesn't want to boot from the new drive.

I might try the backup/restore next, it just feels like I must be missing something obvious.

the_Skywise · 06-17-2007, 02:08 AM

According to mfsinfo the source drive is corrupt. (But oddly enough... it still runs in my tivo... I just can't copy it.

Any ideas for workarounds on this?

the_Skywise · 06-17-2007, 11:50 AM

Got it. dd_rescue to the rescue.

dd was reporting 132,000 blocks transferred even though I had a 250,000 block drive (even using conv=noerror,sync) dd_rescue wasn't on the mfstools disk (and probably should be) so I booted from the linux system rescue cd here:

http://www.sysresccd.org

and then ran dd_rescue as: (source drive on /dev/hda target on /dev/hdb)

dd_rescue -B 1024k /dev/hda /dev/hdb

This copied the entire disk and the tivo happily booted it up even though mfsinfo still says it can't read the partition. I'm going to try spinrite on the original disk now to see if I can get a better recovery (now that I know I've got a working backup).

Thanks for your help guys and good luck to ye who pass by later!