# Should I Still Use this Drive?



## altaman (Feb 7, 2002)

I got the Green Screen of Death on my HD Tivo this week so I decided to try and rescue my hard drive. I purchased a 300G hard drive and successfully transfered my old shows to the new hard drive using dd_rescue (thanks for the great instruction found on this site). When I put the drive in I still got the GSOD but this time after a couple of hours it did repair itself. 

During the copy I noticed it found only 8 errors in one sector. I then decided to buy spinrite and ran it on the drive. It found only 1 bad sector on the drive. 

Since the drive was not in bad shape I am wondering if I should re-use the drive and expand my recording capability or will the problem only start getting worse?


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## Spire (Jun 6, 2001)

The drive is dying. You could run the drive manufacturer's diagnostics on it to tell you exactly what's wrong with it, but it's pretty clear that it's dying from what you've already said. I wouldn't use it if I were you.

If it died while being used as a secondary drive in your TiVo recorder, you would lose _all_ your recordings -- not just the ones on that drive.


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## captain_video (Mar 1, 2002)

Drives start dying from the day you install them. If you've run a full diagnostic on the drive and it passes then it's probably still OK to use for the time being. Just make sure you make a good backup image and keep it on hand. 

You may want to perform the maintenance cycle using SpinRite to help rejuvenate the drive and extend it's life. The GSOD itself is no indication of a failing hard drive, just a corrupt filesystem. I've had GSODs that fixed themselves on drives that ran for several more years after the fact. I see too many posts that falsely equate a GSOD with a bad hard drive which is simply wrong.


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