# Roamio Hard Drive Upgrade Problem.



## gwilliams99 (Dec 7, 2013)

Greetings,
I have a new Roamio Basic that I upgraded the hard drive to a WD AV-GP 3 TB immediately after opening the box.

The physical installation of the drive went without any difficulties. Initial boot with the new drive took a exceptionally long time of over one hour due to the formatting of the large 3 Tb drive.

When the initial formatting and installation of the Tivo OS was complete the Tivo started to play it's startup annimations. These animations played back with stuttering and no audio. After this anomaly the remainder of the setup was uneventful.

On day three of the new Roamio I awoke to find the device rebooting. The reboot suffered the same startup animation stuttering and also exhibited very slow menu navigation and tuning to an ota channel resulted in the tv going blank for several minutes. The Roamio was unresponsive to remote commands at this time, I could however see that the yellow light on the Roamio blinked with remote presses.

The Roamio eventually recovered from this non responsive state and normal ota viewing resumed. Normal viewing continued for an hour or so. Eventually the non-responsiveness returned. This also had a blank channel guide during tuning.

At this point I was forced to reconsider my choice to upgrade the hard drive. I decided at this point re-install the original 500 Gb drive. This went without event. Initial startup with the new drive was fast and the the animations played smoothly. Menu navigation is fast and ota tuning is fast as well.

My question is, has anyone else experienced a similar issue related to a hard drive upgrade? At this point, barring someone else's opinion; I'm inclined to believe the new 3 Tb drive is defective.

Thought's anyone?

Thanks in advance.

Greg


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## xbr23 (Mar 29, 2010)

contact the vendor weaknees and see if they can shed some light on your problem. others here might have some input.


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## gwilliams99 (Dec 7, 2013)

Thanks for the reply, unfortunately the unit did not come from Weaknees.


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## xbr23 (Mar 29, 2010)

gwilliams99 said:


> Thanks for the reply, unfortunately the unit did not come from Weaknees.


i understand but maybe they can tell you why you had the issue. maybe they have seen the problem before.


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## lessd (Jan 23, 2005)

gwilliams99 said:


> Greetings,
> I have a new Roamio Basic that I upgraded the hard drive to a WD AV-GP 3 TB immediately after opening the box.
> 
> The physical installation of the drive went without any difficulties. Initial boot with the new drive took a exceptionally long time of over one hour due to the formatting of the large 3 Tb drive.
> ...


3 hours,! no way, you have a bad drive, us a WD diag program to test out your drive, I just did such an upgrade and the setup took less time for the 3Tb drive as the new software was already on the system as I first ran the unit with the original drive for 1 day to make sure all was OK with the TiVo.


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## gwilliams99 (Dec 7, 2013)

Yes, I just looked on the Western Digital website and I will download the diagnostic tools.

I would have been better off to run the Roamio for a a day or so with the original drive.

I will let you know the results of the test.

Thanks


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## gwilliams99 (Dec 7, 2013)

The Western Digital Quick Test passed.
I'm in the process of writing zero's over the entire drive. (looks like it's going to take 5 hrs to overwrite) 
When that completes, I'm going to run the full test.
If it passes, I'm going to re-install it into the Tivo and see if it is better.


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## nooneuknow (Feb 5, 2011)

I have seen this exact same issue reported elsewhere, ~1 month ago...

I'm certain of it. It was with a WD drive & was a nearly word-for-word description of the behavior.

The member posted they drive passed all WD drive tests and they put it to use in a RAID array instead, and then used a different drive in the TiVo, and no problems with either drive after that.

I remember it, because it was strange, and talked about the stuttering animations.


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## gwilliams99 (Dec 7, 2013)

Yes, it is strange. 
It apparently takes just short of forever to zero a large drive.
I wanted to zero it so there would be no left over Tivo data on it when I ran the full test and re-installed it in the Tivo.

It will really be weird if,when I re-install it, it works flawlessly.


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## HarperVision (May 14, 2007)

nooneuknow said:


> I have seen this exact same issue reported elsewhere, ~1 month ago...
> 
> I'm certain of it. It was with a WD drive & was a nearly word-for-word description of the behavior.
> 
> ...


I remember reading that thread too.


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## gwilliams99 (Dec 7, 2013)

Thanks everyone for your comments on this issue.
I'm pleased to say that the Roamio is now running with the 3 Tb drive installed. It appears to be running perfectly.

The steps to get it running were:
1- remove drive from Roamio
2- install drive in a Win 7 pc
3- add drive to pc via pc admin tool
4- download Western Digital drive diagnostic tool
5- run the WD Quick Drive test- It passed- This took a few minutes.
6- zero the entire drive with the WD tool- It took over 5 hrs
7- run the WD extended full test- It passed- It took over 5 hrs
8- re-installed tested drive into Roamio
9- restarted Roamio.

This time it flew through the setup and was finished in about the same time as the factory 500 Gb.

A interesting symptom of the troubled initial drive install was that it seemed to take forever to contact the Tivo service to begin the download/setup. With the same drive that had been zeroed/tested it connected almost immediately and finished the remaining steps in quick succession. 

Amazingly the startup animations played back without any stutter or audio drop outs.

I'm at a loss as to explain what caused the initial problem. 

Thanks again to everyone that took the time to offer your thoughts.


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## lessd (Jan 23, 2005)

gwilliams99 said:


> Thanks everyone for your comments on this issue.
> I'm pleased to say that the Roamio is now running with the 3 Tb drive installed. It appears to be running perfectly.
> 
> The steps to get it running were:
> ...


Very interesting problem you had, I wonder if just zeroing out the drive would have solved the problem.


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## VideoGrabber (Sep 11, 2003)

gwilliams99 said:


> It apparently takes just short of forever to zero a large drive.
> I wanted to zero it so there would be no left over Tivo data on it when I ran the full test and re-installed it in the Tivo.


There's another reason to run the Write with Zeroes test. If you perform just the "Full" test, that one does only full-surface Reads. I.e., it's "Non-destructive". You could still have a problem it wouldn't catch.

Ask me how I know.


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## VideoGrabber (Sep 11, 2003)

gwilliams99 said:


> ...
> 5- run the WD Quick Drive test- It passed- *It took over 5 hrs*
> 6- zero the entire drive with the WD tool
> 7- run the WD extended full test- It passed- It took over 5 hrs


Step 5 sounds... implausible. The Quick Test should take only a few minutes, since it only tests the interface, does a burst of random Seeks, then a Jump/Skip Read test that samples a small %age of blocks over the entire surface area quickly.

Besides, taking as long as an Extended Full Test simply makes no sense.  The only way I can conceive that happening would be if it was in a constant fail/retry loop, and recovered each block after numerous attempts, but before a timeout failure was triggered.

Are you sure the above is correct?

[Glad it's working for you now though.]


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## nooneuknow (Feb 5, 2011)

VideoGrabber said:


> Step 5 sounds... implausible. The Quick Test should take only a few minutes, since it only tests the interface, does a burst of random Seeks, then a Jump/Skip Read test that samples a small %age of blocks over the entire surface area quickly.
> 
> Besides, taking as long as an Extended Full Test simply makes no sense.  The only way I can conceive that happening would be if it was in a constant fail/retry loop, and recovered each block after numerous attempts, but before a timeout failure was triggered.
> 
> ...


I spotted all that, and noticed all the implausibility. At the same time, as I stated earlier, it was an odd problem, and I'd seen it described word-for-word from an older post in another thread (which HarperVision confirmed remembering), only I think it was a WD Red NAS drive, and the "problematic" drive had no issues once transplanted into a RAID array, after being fully tested with WD diags, but was never tried in the TiVo again, and that person just slapped another Red NAS drive into the TiVo, IIRC on the last two bits.

Back to the implausible description of the test protocols.

1. There's Quick Test, which would never take hours, and should either take single-digit minutes, low double at maximum, or fail within the same single/low-double digit range.

2. There's Extended Test, which reads the whole drive, which is dependent on many factors, but should take several hours (five sounds well within range).

3. There Write Zeroes Test, which writes zeroes to the whole drive, which is dependent on many factors, but should take several hours (five sounds well with range).

4. There's View Test Results, which just provides a savable and printable summary for each and every test you ran on the drive, for the duration of the program being used.

5. There's the option to view the SMART status and values, which isn't a test, so it isn't on the test menu, but the main menu. Since the SMART values can help explain the "WHY?" part of a test operation make the drive work, but also expose what changes after each test, versus the stats before the test, it should be used frequently, in odd scenarios.

I always thought it made more sense to run quick, then write zeroes, then quick again, then extended, then quick again.

Why? It's just has worked best for me, and the quick test actually does a lot of rapid random reads, working the drive hard in the seeking area, where the other test just don't do that part (except, only the one time at the very beginning of the extended test run). Sometimes I've found a drive that can pass the read/write sequentially nature of the other tests, over and over again, for a week, but running that quick test will bug-out and fail on run 11 out of 20 (passing the first ten, then fail on 11, then sometimes passing however remaining tests, or intermittently fail), or fail which is when it's a good sign the drive has an intermittent issue under heavy seeking in read-only testing.

I also prefer writing the zeroes first (unless the drive had data on it I need, in which case I attempt to make a DD/forensic-style clone of the drive before doing any tests, even if not destructive. I also tend to check the SMART counters before and after each test, looking to see if the drive re-allocates any sectors, or if any other values change that may be indicating the drive may be passing the tests, but looking like a candidate for failure. SMART values of certain types can change towards for the worse, essentially telling you it's not a good idea to trust the drive, for various reasons, but things like re-allocating spare sectors in place of bad ones don't make the test fail, until the whole supply of spare sectors in at or near exhausting the supply of them, and so on.

I just didn't want to harsh the poster's mellow, over the tests. I agree they are not plausible, and could easily confuse anybody else who doesn't know better, so I do hope the member who posted those details edit the posts to be plausible, or posts a follow-up post, correcting on the record, since the implausible parts have been quoted a few time by now.

I try not to correct everybody, all the time, since my TCF approval ratings are likely tanked after a long time of correcting everybody all of the time. I try to let somebody else step in on some things, if the last five, or more, posts of my day are negative ones, and/or correcting people.


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## gwilliams99 (Dec 7, 2013)

VideoGrabber said:


> Step 5 sounds... implausible. The Quick Test should take only a few minutes, since it only tests the interface, does a burst of random Seeks, then a Jump/Skip Read test that samples a small %age of blocks over the entire surface area quickly.
> 
> Besides, taking as long as an Extended Full Test simply makes no sense.  The only way I can conceive that happening would be if it was in a constant fail/retry loop, and recovered each block after numerous attempts, but before a timeout failure was triggered.
> 
> ...


I was wrong. It did only take a few minutes for the quick test to complete.
I will correct the original post.

Thanks for pointing out my mistake.


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## gwilliams99 (Dec 7, 2013)

nooneuknow said:


> I spotted all that, and noticed all the implausibility. At the same time, as I stated earlier, it was an odd problem, and I'd seen it described word-for-word from an older post in another thread (which HarperVision confirmed remembering), only I think it was a WD Red NAS drive, and the "problematic" drive had no issues once transplanted into a RAID array, after being fully tested with WD diags, but was never tried in the TiVo again, and that person just slapped another Red NAS drive into the TiVo, IIRC on the last two bits.
> 
> Back to the implausible description of the test protocols.
> 
> ...


Please see the corrected original post.
Thanks


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## gwilliams99 (Dec 7, 2013)

lessd said:


> Very interesting problem you had, I wonder if just zeroing out the drive would have solved the problem.


I have a feeling that writing zero's to the drive would have corrected the problem.

Thanks


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## ltxi (Feb 14, 2010)

gwilliams99 said:


> I have a feeling that writing zero's to the drive would have corrected the problem.
> 
> Thanks


Interesting problem to run into with a new, blank drive. You have more patience than I do. I would have returned and replaced it. Glad you got it fixed.


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## ckeene (Jul 31, 2014)

Another thing to look at might be if the TiVo is run with the original setup the TiVo Firmware might have been updated and something fixed.


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