# Tivo series 2 still rebooting after dd_rescue



## dean9000 (Oct 3, 2007)

Hi all. BTW I love this forum. Some outstanding info. Anyway on to my problem.

I have a series 2 Tivo and the hard drive started flaking out and eventually was rebooting. So I took it out and decided to to go the dd_rescue route and rescue it. I bought a 500 gig hard drive and the original is an 80. dd_rescue ran in in about an hour found some bad sectors but not many. I unhooked the new drive and tested it in the tivo.... Got the green screen of death when I first put it in ....after the 3 hours it got to the powering up and then the welcome screen and then would eventually go blank and go back the the welcome powering up screen again...

I guess I should add that I was hoping to recover the recordings I had on the drive.

My question is if I can't get a running copy off of dd_rescue should I assume the drive is too damaged to recover the recordings? I have a decent data recovery program www.bitmart.net Could it do a better job than dd_rescue? Or am I just wasting my time and should I just give up on getting the recordings back and go with something like instantcake?

Thanks for any feedback...


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## HomeUser (Jan 12, 2003)

dean9000 said:


> My question is if I can't get a running copy off of dd_rescue should I assume the drive is too damaged to recover the recordings? I have a decent data recovery program www.bitmart.net Could it do a better job than dd_rescue? Or am I just wasting my time and should I just give up on getting the recordings back and go with something like instantcake?
> 
> Thanks for any feedback...


Quote from bitmart.net "Professional Data Recovery Software & File Undelete Tool for FAT and NTFS file systems" TiVo does not use either of these file systems.

Spinrite works at the sector level and might be able to recover the bad sectors.


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## dean9000 (Oct 3, 2007)

I guess in my haste I didn't read the software description close enough.....thanks HomeUser...

I will see about giving Spinrite a whirl....are there any other free possibilities? It's $89 bones and I am cheap! 

Thanks....


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## HomeUser (Jan 12, 2003)

dean9000 said:


> I guess in my haste I didn't read the software description close enough.....thanks HomeUser...
> 
> I will see about giving Spinrite a whirl....are there any other free possibilities? It's $89 bones and I am cheap!
> 
> Thanks....


 There are some SpinRite clones out there, I just do not know any that work with TiVo drives. I trust SpinRite and know it works with TiVo drives. I originally purchased it in the early 90's and have upgraded to version 6. The utility has been a good tool it has worked for me recovering a TiVo drive and several times recovering data from PC drives.

Using SpinRite to find hard errors on brand new drives before the warranty period expires makes the price a little more reasonable. I use SpinRite at level 4 to stress all new drives before I will trust them in a PC, TiVo or Xbox .

Oops, Sorry about the SpinRite rant  I sometimes get carried away. Hopefully someone will post a link to one of the free utilities that they have had success using with TiVo drives. In any event if you are able to recover the bad sectors you should clone the drive with dd_rescue or the current version of mfstools MFSLive then stress test the old drive before using it anywhere. Modern drives have a large pool of spare sectors that are automatically swapped out for bad sectors by the drives firmware behind the scene. When you see errors then the pool has been used up and the drive should not be trusted.


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## dean9000 (Oct 3, 2007)

awesome info.... thanks.... I took your advice and gave spinrite a try.... It is a sweet little program. I love the basic interface. Anyway it looks like it did clean the drive nicely (reported no bad sectors). This had me encouraged so I used dd_rescue to clone over the repaired drive and tried the new drive in the tivo. However it still has the same problem of GSOD and rebooting. Same as it did before the scan. I tried the original drive as well just in case it was the copy but it did the same thing. I don't think there is much else I can do at this point other than start with a fresh image. I lose my recordings but at this point there is nothing else I can do. Thanks for your help.


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## HomeUser (Jan 12, 2003)

In the PC using the mfstools boot CD you might look at the log files. I think you will find them in the var partition hda9 as seen from the TiVo. There are several log files that are kept in the /var/log directory one of them might give you a clue to which file got corrupted.

mkdir /mnt/var
mount /dev/hd?9 /mnt/var
cd /mnt/var/log
ls -lsrt
cat filename.ext


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## dean9000 (Oct 3, 2007)

thanks! I will take a look.... i guess if it's one specific file I could replace it off of a good image right?


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## HomeUser (Jan 12, 2003)

dean9000 said:


> thanks! I will take a look.... i guess if it's one specific file I could replace it off of a good image right?


That is sort of what I was thinking. If you do get Instant Cake loaded on the new drive, force a couple of connections to the TiVo server to download the new version of software you then would have a source for the files that is if you can beat the new 9.1 version update.


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