# TCD746500 Premiere drive seemingly dead



## rogerly (Jun 26, 2003)

I've been trying to the last... five(?) days to restore the image of a TiVo Premiere that I bought for my parents a little over a year ago to another, same-sized drive. The TiVo just stopped working and I tried jmfs to restore the 500GB drive to another 500GB drive. 

It reported about 42221 kB in errors and has been trying to repair them for the past three days. At this point, it is "Retrying bad sectors" for its second retry and I don't feel like this is going to work.

I had considered dropping the process and using ddrescue to copy and repair the data directly, but I assume that ddrescue will also attempt to fix the bad sectors and give me the same wait. 

At this point I'd rather just blast a new image on top of their new drive since they've told me that they don't care about their saved shows, and they just want a working TiVo again.

Anyone have any pointers on where I can find an image?

Thanks!


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## unitron (Apr 28, 2006)

rogerly said:


> I've been trying to the last... five(?) days to restore the image of a TiVo Premiere that I bought for my parents a little over a year ago to another, same-sized drive. The TiVo just stopped working and I tried jmfs to restore the 500GB drive to another 500GB drive.
> 
> It reported about 42221 kB in errors and has been trying to repair them for the past three days. At this point, it is "Retrying bad sectors" for its second retry and I don't feel like this is going to work.
> 
> ...


jmfs *is* using ddrescue, so nothing to gain there.

However, if you don't need to save shows, go to the DvrBARS thread and learn how to use that and beg a Premiere image.

(because even though it's only about a year or so old, that original 500GB drive is apparently toast. If it was just the software being scrambled, ddrescue would just blindly copy it, same as it would copy zeros, or random zeros and ones, from a blank drive, so it's a physical problem with the drive, most likely)

If you had a good 320GB drive from the original Premiere you could use that and then expand it into the rest of the 500GB with jmfs, because what you've got is the same hardware as the original Premiere (and therefore uses the same version of the TiVo operating software), just with a bigger drive.

Which means maybe you can restore a 320 image (if you can't get a 500 image) to the new 500 and expand, depending on whether DvrBARS leaves you with an Apple Free partition or not--if it does, jmfs doesn't know how to handle that, so expansion fails.


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## ggieseke (May 30, 2008)

unitron said:


> Which means maybe you can restore a 320 image (if you can't get a 500 image) to the new 500 and expand, depending on whether DvrBARS leaves you with an Apple Free partition or not--if it does, jmfs doesn't know how to handle that, so expansion fails.


It doesn't add or delete any partitions. My 746320 image doesn't have an Apple Free partition, so it will expand with jmfs.

I don't have a 746500 image, but the 750500 (4 tuner) image would probably work. My XL has been running an XL4 image for almost a year without any problems.


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## rogerly (Jun 26, 2003)

I should check the drive I replaced when I upgraded my Premiere. I could just restore from there and reset settings on it. Now where did I put it...

Failing that, I guess I'll go beg for the 746500 image (and failing that, maybe take you up on your 750500 image offer).


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