Bad hard drive

[kozmo21]

I have a DSR6000 that has some old scrambled recordings that I want to get off. The hard drive is near death. I've gotten some of the recordings off, but the unit won't stay running for more than 20 minutes or so without rebooting. I am having problems getting unscramble.o to work with Tytool. I can use SmartFTP, but Tytool for some reason goes about twice as fast,but I get the 10 chunks message.
I would like to use Tytool so I can use the (get parts) because the box doesn't stay alive long enough to get the entire movie without rebooting. (Is there a problem with the path?) I have both mfs_ftp & tserver in the same directory. I'm trying to get all the recordings I can before I use the manufactures disk utility in case it fubars it. This is no longer a subbed unit, just trying to get the last of some movies off before I trash the harddrive. Any help is appreciated.

[Narf54321]

Can you get a blank drive and move the tivo drive to a computer?

If its a heat issue, leave the outer case off the PC and make sure a fan or something is blowing on it. You can use a boot CD-ROM to try and dd or mfsbackup -Tao the entire drive from one to another.

Moving the drive might finally kill it off. But without the tivo OS load, it might also live long enough to grab all your stuff. (Note, it could also be a power supply issue, in whcih case no drive might work in your tivo for long.)

[kozmo21]

A couple of questions:

If I try to put this on another drive will I lose my recordings since they were scrambled?

Will using the manufactures recovery software kill the recordings? It said the drive was failing, but I didn't try to fix because I didn't want to lose the recordings.

Can I move these to my working Tivo and unscramble from it?

Can anyone tell me how to get unscramble.o to work with tytools? It works with mfs_ftp but not tytool.

Thanks

[Narf54321]

If I try to put this on another drive will I lose my recordings since they were scrambled?

If you can get a complete copy, they will be fine. The idea is to copy everything and boot the new drive in the tivo.

Will using the manufactures recovery software kill the recordings? It said the drive was failing, but I didn't try to fix because I didn't want to lose the recordings.

Likely it will damage the MFS recordings and/or your linux partitions. Most of the drive recovery stuff tries to copy bad sectors to good sectors but there is no telling how well it will accomplish this.

[kozmo21]

Thanks for the reply.

I guess I have nothing to lose by trying to make a copy of the hard drive. Does this need to be the exact same size drive? I have another the same size that I had in another Tivo. Can I reformat the drive, or does it have to be a new drive?

Any thoughts on getting the unscramble.o to work in tytools? If I could do this, I can do the get_parts thing and be ok.

Boy, am I glad I did the noscramble on my latest Tivo from the start. It's a lot easier and faster, about 2.6MB/s :D . Both are Series 1, and the old one gets about 1.8 on tytool (but scrambled) and maybe 1.0 on smartFTP :mad: .

[Narf54321]

You need a drive at least as big or bigger than the current one. You can probably use your old drive, but be careful because "the same size" isn't necessarily exact, especially from brand to brand. A couple of sectors too small and your backup won't be completely intact (if there's enough to be intact at this point anyway).

The main question is still whether the drive is crapping out, or whether your tivo machine itself is having issues.

As for unscramble.o, I haven't messed with it. As I understand, you need to do something like monte into a special "unscramble" kernel, and then watch a minute or so of each scrambled show to trigger it to decrypt each recording.

[Narf54321]

Just an addendum, here is the thread describing unscramble.o (http://www.dealdatabase.com/forum/showthread.php?p=135041#post135041) for your series-1 tivo unit.

As mentioned before, you have to watch a little bit of each show to be decrypted.

[kozmo21]

Well, all is good in Tivo land. The hard drive was bad. After I copied it to another drive everything works fine. I wish I would have done this long ago.
Is it worth trying to use the disk utility to fix and put the old drive in another tivo or a PC,or am I just asking for trouble?
I'm still curious why I couldn't get unscramble.o to work with Tytools?

Thanks again

[PlainBill]

Well, all is good in Tivo land. The hard drive was bad. After I copied it to another drive everything works fine. I wish I would have done this long ago.
Is it worth trying to use the disk utility to fix and put the old drive in another tivo or a PC,or am I just asking for trouble?
I'm still curious why I couldn't get unscramble.o to work with Tytools?

Thanks again
You're asking for trouble. It failed once, it will fail again - and probably at a bad time.

PlainBill