# Bolt drive died, anyway to possibly attempt recovery of shows?



## sbl2786 (Mar 27, 2020)

My drive died last night, I think I'm going to get a drive replacement to do it myself.. Seems like the cheapest option.. My question is I saw on weaknees site that they offer possible recovery of data, is this at all possible to try myself? How would I go about doing that if remotely possible?


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## sbl2786 (Mar 27, 2020)

Alternatively is there anything I can to view what was on there like just in terms of file names or something? I just want to create a list because I had stuff on there for awhile and I don't remember where I was at with certain shows or what was left to watch etc.


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## Sixto (Sep 16, 2005)

Just be careful not to attach any other drive to the Bolt or you’ll forever lose everything on the original drive. Lots of discussion here about this topic. The drive is married to the unit, and as soon as a new drive is recognized, the previous drive can never be reattached and keep it’s data. 

You do have an option to possibly clone the previous drive to the same or bigger drive, if the drive is accessible. I used a Sabrent dual bay to check the bad drive, along with DriveDx. My drive was dead, but others sometimes have success.


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## sbl2786 (Mar 27, 2020)

Sixto said:


> Just be careful not to attach any other drive to the Bolt or you'll forever lose everything on the original drive. Lots of discussion here about this topic. The drive is married to the unit, and as soon as a new drive is recognized, the previous drive can never be reattached and keep it's data.
> 
> You do have an option to possibly clone the previous drive to the same or bigger drive, if the drive is accessible. I used a Sabrent dual bay to check the bad drive, along with DriveDx. My drive was dead, but others sometimes have success.


So if I used the Sabrent or similar product in theory if it worked I could just clone the drive to the new one using that and nothing else?


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## sbl2786 (Mar 27, 2020)

Or is it better to use some sort of cloning software? I'm on windows


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## Sixto (Sep 16, 2005)

sbl2786 said:


> So if I used the Sabrent or similar product in theory if it worked I could just clone the drive to the new one using that and nothing else?


Yes, just search this site. Been done before.


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## Sixto (Sep 16, 2005)

sbl2786 said:


> Or is it better to use some sort of cloning software? I'm on windows


Think you need a perfect clone, sector by sector.


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## V7Goose (May 28, 2005)

sbl2786 said:


> So if I used the Sabrent or similar product in theory if it worked I could just clone the drive to the new one using that and nothing else?


I see you are relatively new here, so you probably haven't had the time to do mush of the research on what other members have already documented. I'll briefly repeat some of it, but you do need to do some of your own research on these forums.

If your drive is totally dead, there is absolutely no way to ever recover anything from it. But often a drive will "fail" in a TiVo, but still seem to work when connected to a PC. If this is the case, you should try to use ddrescue to copy the readable portions of the drive to a new drive. This is basically the same as cloning the drive, but ddrescue is specifically designed to try to deal with bad sectors or other problems on the source drive. If ddrescue works, you can often then just put the new target drive in the same TiVo, and most or all of your old recordings and settings will still be there. If the data was too badly damaged or corrupted, it will not work, but you have not lost anything but some time to give it a try.

This is really your only chance to salvage anything from the old drive. And it does not work to move data to a different TiVo - the drive must go back into the SAME TiVo the source drive came out of. And as you have already been told, if it is a Bolt, that box must NOT have been booted even one time with any other drive since the source drive was removed.


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## gabrielstern (Aug 19, 2017)

correct with bolts if you boot up a different drive you lose everything I would try weak knees or dd rescue but moving forward I would not ever use an internal drive or the stock hard drives in tivo bolts, as the lap top size hard drives get too hot inside the bolts as their is not enough space to keep them cool, I recommend using western digital red or purple desktop size drives and affixing them on top of the bolt using velcro strips, so the drive does not get as hot, also if you do get a red drive make sure you do not get the plus or pro models as they are 7200 rpm drives, and you do not want to use them.

also in the future if you have a romio I suggest creating back up hard drives in them, as romios do not have the same issues as bolts do you can swap different hard drives back and forth without losing recordings, and use them to restore recordings and settings if a hard drive goes bad.


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