HD XL Bad hard drive

You may need to use a fresh image to another new drive as this one may have failed/starting to fail.

 

If its not a 7200+ RPM or use more power than the power supply can handle, it would work.
Recommended is WD20EFRX for a 2TB.

 

You can try it. If there are problems, you may need a new image.

 

Your drive is clearly failing, if not already totally gone. There is a slight chance that you can save the content if it is still readable by your computer, but the longer you let it run, the greater the chance that it will completely die. There is no "error check" that is going to fix it if it has a physical problem, but the unnecessary work on the drive could quite possible make it worse. But there is no harm in trying to copy the drive. If it works you win, if not, you do not lose anything not already lost.

Your best course of action is to use a computer to run ddrescue to copy the old drive to your new one. ddrescue is specifically designed to try and deal with failing drives and save as much content as possible. The only thing you have to loose is the time.

If the ddrescue works, that might be all you need - the TiVo could boot right up and show no problems. But if the new drive either fails to boot or shows some problems after it does, then you can try a kiskstart 57 or 58 to attempt to let the TiVo try to fix any data corruption. If you still have problems after that, then just use your computer to put a fresh image on the drive and forget about trying to save anything from the old drive.

 

I do not really know - it has been a long time since I needed to use it. But anything on big drives takes a long time if it has to read the entire drive - I'd expect 5-10 hours anyway.

 

I love it when a plan comes together! I'm glad that it worked out well for you.

Now connect that old drive to your PC and run the manufacturer's tests on it to see if it is really bad. If the SMART results are good and it passes a long test, then you can probably just format it and use it for something else.

Most likely the corrupted data on it was caused by a drive that was actually failing, but no way to be sure without the extra tests. I did not recommend that you try these tests or the kickstart first on that drive for the reasons I mentioned above - if the drive is developing internal problems such as surface errors on the platters, just running these tests could finish pushing it over the cliff. But now that you have already copied the programs off of it, who cares?

 

It is unlikely that your replaced caps went bad again (as long as you actually replaced them all). The issue with the caps was a massive influx of garbage parts from China around the early 2000s, and this crap affected electronics in all industries, not just our TiVos. By 2014, this was well understood, so it is most likely that your replacement caps were good ones.

As I have said, the most likely cause of your problem is that your original drive was just failing from age, but if the issue was simply data corruption on a good drive, you will most likely never find an answer - it could have been caused by a passing ring wraith, sun spots, a random burp in the software, or something as simple as a power failure during a critical write to a file on the disk that was central to the OS operation.

Just make sure you run a long test on the drive - one that at least reads every single sector - even better is a full read/write test. If thee is any developing problem on the drive, that will find it. I generally prefer to use the manufacturer's own drive testing utility, but Crystal Disk Info is also good. If the tests report any errors at all, I'd just trash the drive and move on. Not worth the risks of surprise problems in the future if you put it back into service.

 

Series 3 are no longer supported except for units with lifetime service.