can I extract recordings from drive B after drive A dies?

[jakerome]

Hi,

The 40GB "A" drive in my TiVo died yesterday during a failed hack. The drive is completely kaput, it won't even power up.

I'd like to recover the shows on my 120GB "B" drive if possible. Is there any way to do this on a Mac (running Mac OS X 10.3), via a brute-force method or otherwise? Can I even recover stuff from the "B" drive using Linux? I've read parts of the sticky post, but it's hard for me to figure out what to do. Thanks for your help.

[TheWickedPriest]

Tridge's toolset should compile equally well under Mac OS X as under Linux (I know it's PPC-compatible, anyway), which should allow you to do local extraction in the same way. But I have no idea how to deal with your dead-A-drive situation, sorry.

[jakerome]

Thanks, that sound promising! I've done a quick search of the forum for "tridge" but it's not obvious to me where I find this stuff. Could you point me in the right direction?

[rc3105]

this gets asked every once in a while, the short answer is:

if your A drive dies it's impractical to recover recordings from B


it's theoretically possible in the same way that you can use a hex editor to look at the raw sectors on a fat32 that's been formatted, but nobody's developed / released a mfs equivilant of norton utilities

unless A got dropped, most likely what got fried was the drive controller board. your best bet is to locate an identical drive, swap boards & see if it'll spin up. if so, first thing is make a mfstools backup of both drives (won't include recordings but WILL include critical info on where the recordings are physically located on the disks) then use the steps / tools in this thread Direct extraction from a tivo drive in a pc (not networked) (http://www.dealdatabase.com/forum/s...;threadid=23192)

course, if A works with the new board you can just fire up the tivo & network the recordings out

yes I know that thread's pc oriented & you have a mac (me too actually) but the guides & utils were mostly developed by folks with pcs. it'll be easier for you to borrow a pc or boot virtual pc & follow a howto than port the utils & figure out the mac specifics

[jakerome]

Thanks rc. I had the same idea about swapping the circuit board, too. I did an eBay search for a similar drive, and found some, but how do I know exactly if it's the same model number? And, if anyone lives in LA, is there a place that sells used hard drives, which would give me the oppurtunity to try-before-I-buy, or at least make sure I've got the right model?

[captain_video]

It shouldn't be all that difficult to match up the model number. The exact model whould be indicated on one of the stickers on the drive. If there's any variation between models the number will be different, even between models of the same capacity. I've done the board swap trick several times and it works great for recovering recordings from a "dead" drive. I managed to ham-handed enough to kill two drives in different S1 DTivos and got both of them replaced under warranty with no questions asked. I acidentally shorted a pin to ground on one of the chips and it killed the card. I was sent the exact same model Quantum drives as replacements so the controller cards were identical to the ones on the drives I killed. I swapped the cards, recovered the recordings, and then swapped the cards back before I returned the dead drive to Maxtor.