# Making mfsbackup ignore bad sectors?



## jemenake (Dec 13, 2000)

So, a week ago, my dual-drive (40GB & 100GB) TiVo started stuttering and giving artifacts on the screen... been getting worse and worse, reboots give long boot times (or the green "recovering from serious problem" screen), but it eventually boots.

The replacement drive is on its way. However, since things are getting progressively worse, I decided to back the thing up to one of my big SATA drives in a PC.

mfsbackup -f 9999 -6so /mnt/tivo.bak /dev/hda /dev/hdb

works fine... because it doesn't back up the shows.

mfsbackup -aqo /mnt/tivo.bak /dev/hda /dev/hdb

fails, complaining about "input/output error".

I know that 95% of the show data is good, and I'd like to watch them even with the glitches. Is there any way to force the backup to succeed? Perhaps there is an undocumented parameter for mfsbackup *or* maybe there's some flag I can slip to the linux kernel, itself, telling it to silently return garbage (or zeros) for any unreadable sector.

- Joe


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## HomeUser (Jan 12, 2003)

dd_rescue is what you need to do a binary copy of the failing drive to the replacement drive.

NOTE: dd_rescue makes a byte by byte copy of the drive to the new drive any partitions and data on the new drive will be lost.


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## jemenake (Dec 13, 2000)

> dd_rescue is what you need to do a binary copy of the failing drive to the replacement drive.
> 
> NOTE: dd_rescue makes a byte by byte copy of the drive to the new drive any partitions and data on the new drive will be lost.


Okay, so I'm guessing that I have to dd_rescue all drives that have errors (this *is* a dual-drive setup, currently), correct? So, worst-case, I'd have to have two spare drives, dd_rescue to them, and then mfsbackup from them to my new 160GB I'm getting?

Will there be any problem if the destination drives in the dd_rescue are larger than the current drives?

Will there be any problem if the two intermediate destination drives sum up to be *larger* than the final drive? (For example, my 40GB and 100GB getting dd_rescue'd to a 80GB and a 120GB, say, and then mfsbackup'ing them to the 160GB that's coming in the mail).

- Joe


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## HomeUser (Jan 12, 2003)

You can dd_rescue just the failing drive out of the two drives to a drive of the same size or larger. This will make the good original drive and now working copy drive work in the TiVo as it did before. Now with the working pair of drives you can make a normal backup. Unfortunately you can not go back to a single drive configuration and keep recordings with the Series 2 TiVos. You could upload the recordings to a PC with TiVo Desktop then copy back after the upgrade without recordings.


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## TiVoDan (Jun 2, 2002)

HomeUser said:


> You can dd_rescue just the failing drive out of the two drives to a drive of the same size or larger. This will make the good original drive and now working copy drive work in the TiVo as it did before. Now with the working pair of drives you can make a normal backup. Unfortunately you can not go back to a single drive configuration and keep recordings with the Series 2 TiVos. You could upload the recordings to a PC with TiVo Desktop then copy back after the upgrade without recordings.


How do you know which drive is the failing drive?


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## ct1 (Jun 27, 2003)

TiVoDan said:


> How do you know which drive is the failing drive?


Sometimes you can tell by listening carefully. It sort of clicks when it retries the bad sectors.


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## wscannell (Dec 7, 2003)

You could try the bootable manufacturer diagnostics to see which drive is reporting errors.


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## wscannell (Dec 7, 2003)

Actually, you can make a single drive TiVo and save recordings because the first drive has never been expanded. However, the single drive would be limited to 140GB because it could not be expanded again.


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## HomeUser (Jan 12, 2003)

Manufactures hard drive diagnostics, Spinrite or just try copying one of the drives the copy process slows way down when it hits the errors. To be safe get two new drives you still should test that the new drives are error free with the Manufactures diags.


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## TiVoDan (Jun 2, 2002)

wscannell said:


> You could try the bootable manufacturer diagnostics to see which drive is reporting errors.


My situation is similar to jemenake's. I have a SVR-3000 with a 120 gb Samsung drive with jumpers set to the master position, that has 15 partitions, and a maxtor 80 GB with jumpers set to the slave position, that has 5 partitions. 
A few days ago I got the GSOD-reboot loop. I would like to figure out which disk has gone bad but since my computer is an intel iMac with no floppy drives I can't run the manufacturers diagnostics, and the diagnostic software I do have is not reporting any errors.

I would like to be able to copy both drives over to a 320 GB seagate drive that i bought last week. Any ideas?


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## HomeUser (Jan 12, 2003)

Most of the drive diagnostics are downloadable in floppy or CD iso's. can the iMac boot from a CD? I do not know of any way to merge two drives back to a single drive while keeping the recordings.


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## wscannell (Dec 7, 2003)

TiVoDan said:


> My situation is similar to jemenake's. I have a SVR-3000 with a 120 gb Samsung drive with jumpers set to the master position, that has 15 partitions, and a maxtor 80 GB with jumpers set to the slave position, that has 5 partitions.
> A few days ago I got the GSOD-reboot loop. I would like to figure out which disk has gone bad but since my computer is an intel iMac with no floppy drives I can't run the manufacturers diagnostics, and the diagnostic software I do have is not reporting any errors.
> 
> I would like to be able to copy both drives over to a 320 GB seagate drive that i bought last week. Any ideas?


As long as you do not want to save recordings, that can be done. One expansion is the limit on the primary A drive and you have already expanded. You need to do a backup of both drives with the mfsbackup -s option and then restore and expand. Check out these instructions for more details: http://tivo.upgrade-instructions.com/


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