# Backing up a failing drive



## Tu13es (Aug 29, 2006)

My TivoHD got stuck in the Welcome!/Almost there... reboot loop yesterday. I called Tivo and they wanted $49.99 to replace it. Screw that! So I ordered a 1TB drive from Newegg which should be here in a few days.

In the meantime, I borrowed a USB/SATA dock, fired up WinMFS and did:

Backup Tivo Drive
Backup Bootpage
Backup Kernel

Everything claimed it was a success.

Does this mean I should be okay to restore the above data to my new HDD? My Tivo still won't boot with the current drive. I'm wondering whether the backed up data will be invalid and not let me use my new drive.

Thanks.


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## lessd (Jan 23, 2005)

Tu13es said:


> My TivoHD got stuck in the Welcome!/Almost there... reboot loop yesterday. I called Tivo and they wanted $49.99 to replace it. Screw that! So I ordered a 1TB drive from Newegg which should be here in a few days.
> 
> In the meantime, I borrowed a USB/SATA dock, fired up WinMFS and did:
> 
> ...


If the drive has some bad sectors or other problems, the backup most likely will not work, in order to work you have to assume that your computer can read a drive that TiVo can't, that may true but i would not count on it, if not you need a image of your model TiVo to put on your new drive.


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## Tu13es (Aug 29, 2006)

lessd said:


> If the drive has some bad sectors or other problems, the backup most likely will not work, in order to work you have to assume that your computer can read a drive that TiVo can't, that may true but i would not count on it, if not you need a image of your model TiVo to put on your new drive.


If there are bad sectors, can I fix it with my PC somehow?


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## lessd (Jan 23, 2005)

Tu13es said:


> If there are bad sectors, can I fix it with my PC somehow?


There are some programs out there that will repair some disk problems, this is a link to one of them http://www.grc.com/spinrite.htm


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## Resist (Dec 21, 2003)

Tu13es said:


> My TivoHD got stuck in the Welcome!/Almost there... reboot loop yesterday. I called Tivo and they wanted $49.99 to replace it. Screw that!


Seems to me $49.99 to replace your Tivo is a great deal. That is certainly cheaper than the new hard drive you bought, so why did you pass on it?


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## Tu13es (Aug 29, 2006)

Resist said:


> Seems to me $49.99 to replace your Tivo is a great deal. That is certainly cheaper than the new hard drive you bought, so why did you pass on it?


I paid $69.99 for a 1TB drive. IMO, definitely worth $20 for 6 times the storage of the original.


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## ronsch (Sep 7, 2001)

You can try copying the old drive to the new one with dd_rescue but it may be too late.


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## Resist (Dec 21, 2003)

Tu13es said:


> I paid $69.99 for a 1TB drive. IMO, definitely worth $20 for 6 times the storage of the original.


Yes but you said they would replace your entire Tivo box for the $49.99. That makes it a much better deal than $69.99 for a new 1TB drive.


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## mr.unnatural (Feb 2, 2006)

+1 for the SpinRite recommendation. I've run it on older Tivo drives that gave me the GSOD or simply refused to boot and it rejuvenated them to the point where they could self-repair themselves during the GSOD. I was then able to create a viable backup image that I could restore to a replacement drive. 

The drives had bad clusters that were damaged beyond repair but SpinRite was able to recover enough data to enable the Tivo to boot into the GSOD. Prior to that the Tivo would simply go into an endless reboot loop and never get beyond the initial screen. SpinRite fixed whatever clusters it could and mapped the bad clusters, allowing the Tivo OS to restore the missing data while in the GSOD.


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## VegasBaby (Aug 25, 2010)

Resist said:


> Yes but you said they would replace your entire Tivo box for the $49.99. That makes it a much better deal than $69.99 for a new 1TB drive.


NO IT's NOT.

You will be hit with an additional 199.00 lifetime transfer FEE for the new box as well (Assuming u have lifetime on the box)


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