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Upgrade from TWO DRIVE HDVR3 to Single drive

970 Views 5 Replies 3 Participants Last post by  tivoboy, 
T
So, I have a five year old HDVR2/3 DTV tivo. I had upgraded to add a second drive about four - five years ago, and it worked fine till yesterday when the power UPS went out, and for some reason it is on POWERING UP now forever.

When I take out the second upgraded drive, the added storage, the first drive gets to Almost There, but never makes it anywhere.

Not really sure if the drives are gone, or A drive is gone, but am willing to try anything.

What is the best way to test the drives? Is the spinrite software the best? When hooking up to a computer, does it still have to be a FAT32 computer and not win 2k, or xp?

Is there a way to move to a LARGER HD, and get the recordings OFF these drives? What would be the software for doing that?

This seemed to be a solution not yet covered in the posts I have read in the past 10 hours.
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C
Put the drives in your PC and run the manufacturer's diagnostics on each one. You'll probably have to make a boot floppy to run the program from. Since you're running the program off a floppy it makes no difference what filesystem is on your hard drive.

Your dual drive Tivo will never boot if you remove one of the drives. It will always think there are supposed to be two drives installed and won't boot if it finds one missing.

You may be able to recover the recordings and copy everything over to a larger single drive. Check Hinsdale's How To for instructions or check out the mfslive.org website. Note that each one uses a different boot CD for their respective operations.
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T
floppy? floppy? who's got a floppy?

:)

I'll see what maxtor has in the way of boot cd's for drive checking. I remembered after posting, of course, that if I put them in the 'puter and boot from a drive then Filesystem won't be affected. I'll checkout the mfslive stuff, looks like we've come quite a way since my last HDTIVO upgrade.
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T
So, update

It looks like the A drive may be bad. The MAXTOR diagnostics seems to stop at 60-70% and not go any further. The B drive, the upgrade drive, appears fine, even with the LONG tests.

So, what is the best way to upgrade BOTH drives to a NEW single drive, or is it best to just upgrade the A drive that seems to be failing. This is the original TIVO drive?

Is the dd_repair program the best way to get the files off the A drive and write them to a new larger drive? What about adding the content from the B drive, of should I just continue with a TWO drive system.

thanks for pointers
N
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S
I had a similar problem occur a few years ago where my original A drive was failing. I ran Spinrite on it in data recovery mode to get it to the point where I could operate on it, then used one of the mfs upgrade tools to put in a replacement drive while retaining recordings.
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T
I should have tried that, I just went with a new image. I might still be able to do the spinrite on it.
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