HR10-250 drive dying -- how to salvage/upgrade?

[dennya]

My drive is going out on my HR10-250. Stutters, lack of responsiveness to the remote, and just had my first spontanous reboot.

Rather than going through the refurb process, I'm going to pull the 250GB drive and replace it with a 400GB drive. I plan to use the Weaknees disc/guide, unless you guys have a better suggestion.

However, I'm guessing there's probably some bad data on the disc. The drive currently boots and runs okay, so I think the actual Tivo OS stuff is okay. And I seem to be able to play existing recordings okay.

What would you guys suggest as far as backup procedures? I'd like to try to save/transfer the shows if possible, but I want to make an "OS only" backup as well in case I'm unable to copy everything to the new drive due to drive problems. Suggestions on the best procedure/tools to ensure I can get the tivo back up and running would be greatly appreciated.

[captain_video]

I would recommend that you backup the OS image first as it only takes a short time to accomplish. You'll have to decide whether or not the recordings are worth salvaging. The process of making direct copy of the existing drive can be lengthy and the old drive may not last through the transition but it may still be worth giving it a shot. If you are unable to get a complete copy of the drive then at least you'll have the backup image to fall back on.

[PlainBill]

I'd suggest doing it in two steps. As Captain Video suggested, do the OS first. Assumptions: FAT32 drive on primary master, cdrom on primary slave, original drive on secondary master, new drive on secondary slave, FAT32 partition mounted as /cdrive.

mfsbackup -l 50 -6so /cdrive/hr10_250.mfs /dev/hdc This should take less than 20 minutes, and will show it's progress.

Now pipline the old drive to the new drive and expand:

mfsbackup -Tao - /dev/hdc | mfsrestore -s 200 -xzpi - /dev/hdd

Initialize the swap partition according to the information in this post (http://www.dealdatabase.com/forum/showthread.php?p=233561).

It's a tossup whether doing a non-destructive surface scan of the original drive first would be a good idea. If successful, you would be backing up and copying a good drive. If the drive is really about to fail, the extra time could be fatal.

PlainBill

[MoSk33t3r]

I think I am goign to do the same very soon, my tivo losses all the channels when ever it feels like, a reboot and they are back.

[bigrig]

Would dd_rescue be better than mfsbackup?

Matt

[PlainBill]

Would dd_rescue be better than mfsbackup?

Matt


Eeehhh??? Maybe, maybe not. I would suspect the OP has some bad sectors developing on his drive and the system is using that area of the drive for buffering. mfsbackup should handle this situation without any problems. If you have marginal sectors that are holding a recording it would certainly be worth using dd_rescue.

PlainBill

[bcc]

My drive is going out on my HR10-250. Stutters, lack of responsiveness to the remote, and just had my first spontanous reboot.Check your logs for disk errors. You can also try a 'smartctl -a /dev/hda' to check SMART history of disk errors. I had similar behavior to what you describe, and my logs showed a few permanent disk errors. Note that while replacing the disk fixed the disk errors, it did not fix the related MFS filesystem corruption. However, a clear-and-delete-everything command rebuilt MFS and my tivo has been happy every since. As a bonus, the performance of scheduling recordings was restored to original levels.

If you don't have disk errors I wouldn't waste time replacing the disk, just do the clear-and-delete-everything (which doesn't delete your hacks, btw). Recommend you backup your channel prefs&season passes with tivoweb first.