# Series 2 dead hard drive reanimated



## triplem (Dec 6, 2004)

Just thought I'd share this quickly with the group at large in case someone else can benefit from this post. Lord knows I've lurked and you all have more once helped fix my tivo after I thought I killed it.

This involves a Maxtor Diamondmax 160GB hard drive. My power cord connection to the Tivo has always been a little goofy, and one day I mustve bumped it because I went from watching a show to 'Welcome Powering Up' and it would just sit there.

Opened up the unit and it didn't sound like the hard drive was spinning up at all. Long story summarized:

Tried the newest MFStools to restore the image. The drive was recognized in Linux, however, it would fail.

I tried InstantCake and while slightly more sucessful, it too would fail after the compressed image was transferred. It would try to decompress the image to the drive and then fail.

I tried Spin-Rite, which fixed another drive a while ago. It didn't work.

I decided to put it in Windows XP to see if it recognized the drive, and while my BIOS did, and Device Manager saw it as working properly, the Disk Util in XP wouldn't acknowledge the drive, thus no way to format it.

BTW after booting in XP my startup was noticibly slower and I could hear a noticible knock on the drive. Accessing anything like the Disk Tools or Device Manager was much slower with more knocking.

At my wits end, the only other CD I had worth a darn was the MaxBlast software that came with the drive. I installed it, and lo and behold it asked if I wanted to format the drive. I did so and the drive instantly came to life.

No more knocking! Back to MFStools and the restore worked great. I got my Tivo back.

I'm not sure what MaxBlast was doing that XP, InstantCake, SpinRite, or MFSTools couldn't do. But before you chuck that drive, give your drive utilities a try. It worked for me.

Thanks again to every who posts helpful information here. My Tivo and I thank you.


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## flyersfan (Nov 11, 2002)

Maybe I'm just paranoid, but I would replace that drive ASAP if I were you. Once a hard drive starts going downhill, a total failure usually isn't too far off. Having to perform a complete low level format on the drive is not a good sign.


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## jtown (Sep 26, 2002)

OTOH, I had an old 80 gig Maxtor start glitching in my Tivo and PowerMax claimed to have repaired it. The drive ran for at least another year without incident before it started glitching again (and, that time, couldn't be repaird by PowerMax). At first I'd planned to replace it as soon as a good drive went on sale. Then a week went by and it was still working. So I waited another month then figured I'd let it go until it died for real.


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