# Drive replacement



## dcorbin (Mar 31, 2002)

I have a Sony T-60, with a single 120GB drive that I have previously upgraded. The drive is 'showing signs of failure', so I'm going to replace it. I am replacing it with a 160GB drive.

I would like to confirm that I do not need to do anything other than a "dd" to copy the drive, if I'm not worried about the unused space for the last 17G (or 40G) of the new drive. I have enough recording space, I simply want a reliable drive.

Furthermore, I'm curious if I need to watch the temperature more carefully, since the new drive is a 7200 RPM drive.

Thanks


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## jedwards (Jun 1, 2003)

The short answer is yes. If you dd one drive to another, the tivo will see copies of the original partitions. Since the rest of the space will not be reflected in the partition table, it will be invisible to the tivo.

However, the time to set up the system, and dd the drive is not appreciably shorter than using mfstool dump | mfstool restore. If I were you, I would initially try mftsool to perform the copy. After all, if dd fails to read a block it will exit unless explicitly told to tolerate errors. If a block is in a sector with critical parts of the system, then allowing dd to skip the block may just gloss over a future problem. It is better to know about it before hand than end up with a system that may run unreliably.

I would suggest using dump | restore initially. If that works, you will have a healthy system with more disk space. If it fails, feel free to either try dd or a tool like dd_rescue as a last ditch to get your data onto a more stable drive for further evaluation.


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