# Hard Drive I/O error



## hazemi (Sep 1, 2003)

Wow, so I'm trying to fix a broken philips directTiVo of my friend's. I'm also trying to make use of some old 160GB HD's I used to have in one of my TiVos. 

I tried putting the HDs into a windows machine but after booting up okay windows can't find the HD. If I run maxblast4 it shows the drive exists but I can't get at it.

I tried using a windows boot disk to reformat the drive but I got an I/O error saying it couldn't read the disk.

I tried to use another 160GB HD that I used to have in a TiVo to upgrade the broken HD in the philips direct TiVo. I'm using instant cake for the image but when I run it I get the same kind of I/O error that I'm getting when I try to access the drive in windows.

I'm sorry if this has been covered before but a search for I/O error didn't direct me to an answer!


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## craig58 (Oct 16, 2006)

hazemi said:


> Wow, so I'm trying to fix a broken philips directTiVo of my friend's. I'm also trying to make use of some old 160GB HD's I used to have in one of my TiVos.
> 
> I tried putting the HDs into a windows machine but after booting up okay windows can't find the HD. If I run maxblast4 it shows the drive exists but I can't get at it.
> 
> ...


Sounds like either both hard drives are bad or possibly a bad IDE cable.


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## hazemi (Sep 1, 2003)

unlikely, they were both working in a TiVo just a few days ago!


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## Mars (Sep 13, 2001)

Are any of the hard drives Western Digital? WD has the usual jumper settings for master or slave, but also "stand alone" setting if the drive was on the IDE ribbon by itself and won't work if you add a slave to it.


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## hazemi (Sep 1, 2003)

They're both maxtor drives.
Does using a drive in a TiVo somehow lock in from being used in the future?


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## blindlemon (May 12, 2002)

Yes, you will need to unlock them using DiskDutil before you can use them in a PC or reformat them with InstantCake.


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## Mars (Sep 13, 2001)

If they were locked, you would still "see" the drives, just that they would be reported as being 9 to 10 meg in size. Might still be something else.


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## hazemi (Sep 1, 2003)

When I first put the drive in and loaded up windows, it didn't show up under 'my computer' but it was there in the disk manager. When I clicked on it it said it had to 'sign' the drive or something like that. I said okay and let it sign the drive but I should have been more cautious. It seemed like a regular thing to do but after that the disk stopped showing up in the disk manager. It still shows up in the max-blast software but it tells me that it is a boot drive and that it is partitioned exactly the same as my main HD. I'm not sure why. It won't let me make any changes to it. It's still detected by the bios tho.


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## Mars (Sep 13, 2001)

When I have been able to see the drives in the bios, they aways show up in the linux boot up disk. Just ignore the windows stuff and boot your TiVo hack disk, look for the drives and sizes as the program loads, use "shift"+"page up" to back up the initial display. If you see your drives in here, your upgrade should go ok.


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## blindlemon (May 12, 2002)

Have you tried unlocking the drives yet? 

If you are getting an error with InstantCake that implies this is something other than a Windows problem.

It's always a good idea to set the BIOS auto-detection to "none" for the IDE ports to which you are attaching TiVo/linux drives too


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## hazemi (Sep 1, 2003)

I am supposed to run the diskutil from a boot disk? 
I tried running it from the command prompt in windows and it crashed when i used it on disk 0 and disk 1. I'm assuming those are IDE0 and IDE1, if they are primary master/slave then it would be two cdroms and that would explain the crash.

on disk 2 and 3 it said that the drives were not locked....

on the off hand i need a boot disk, anyone got a convenient link to an ISO image I can burn?

*greedY*


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## Mars (Sep 13, 2001)

http://www.dvrupgrade.com/dvr/stores/1/lba48_support.cfm


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