[tanyatnt]

I'm hoping that someone out there will be able to answer this distress call I'm sending out.

Here's the situation:

There was a power failure while I was out of town and when I got back today, my Series2 SA wouldn't progress past the "Welcome. Powering up..." screen. After reading posts I realized that my Maxtor 160GB hard drive was the culprit. I tested the drive with PowerMax and it found some read errors on certain sectors. I didn't want to let PowerMax fix it because I wanted to make sure I recovered the 150 hours worth of programs that are still on the disk first.

Now, the only free disk I have around the house is a WD 250GB. I want to replace the old disk with this one but I want to transfer all my recordings as well. I have the MFSTools 2.0 CD and the LBA48 stuff from PTVupgrade. I've tried to do a backup of the 160GB disk but it fails with a read error and I can't get the FDISK utility to read the disk either. Do I need to do the backup or can I do a straight disk to disk copy?

Is it a lost cause or can I somehow rescue my recordings onto the 250GB disk?

Thanks!!

 

[HomeUser]

If it is worth a $90 long shot you could try using SpinRite http://www.grc.com/sr/spinrite.htm to try and recover the bad sectors. Other wise try dd_rescue.

 

[Andy in NYC]

Actually, if the Tivo won't boot due to the bad sectors it is likely that the corruption/failure will cause a dd_rescue'd disk to be non-bootable also. I just had this problem with a Series 1 120gb disk which failed. After twenty some-odd hours, I had a dd'd disk which had the same boot problem as the original (although the new disk would pass the Maxtor diagnostics).

Andrew

 

[tanyatnt]

I'm willing to try the dd_rescue to see if it can salvage the data, but I thought that it would only do an exact disk to disk copy. Since I'm going from a 160GB disk to a 250GB disk, won't that make 90GB of the disk invisible to Tivo?

 

[HomeUser]

Yes, dd_rescue does a binary copy unlike dd or cp dd_rescue can continue copying if good data is not read after a couple of read errors. Copying the bad data might be ok if the block is not used or is of no value. That is why I recommend running SpinRite on the HD first in an attempt to recover the bad sectors first. Unless you already own a copy the $90 price is a little steep for a single use. I run it on the PC twice a year to refresh the data on disk and hopefully detect and map out any week areas before data loss.

If there is an expand left you could use MFSTools to re-expand the new drive. Series2 TiVo normally can be expanded only once per drive. to expand an all-ready expanded drive needs to start from scratch.

Do you know where on the hard drive the diagnostics detected the bad sectors?

 

[tanyatnt]

Yeah, I think $90 might be too steep a price to pay for a one-time use scenario like this.

The 250GB drive has never been used so it should be expandable using MFSTools so that's one worry taken care of.

As for where the bad sectors are, I'm not sure. The PowerMax tool gave me an error on the read and returned a diagnostic code then immediately tried to "fix" the bad sector. I didn't want to take the chance of it wiping out any data so I exited out of the program. I can check the disk again when I get home and see if the PowerMax program will give me the locations of the bad sectors.

 

[HomeUser]

I was wondering if the error is located in the boot sector or kernel you might be able to dd_rescue then replace just the bad area from another source.