# TiVo Premiere XL TCD748000 Hard Drive Replacement



## Xerxes3rd (Jul 3, 2015)

A friend of mine gave me her old TiVo Premiere XL TCD748000 that wasn't working. I bought a new 1TB WD10EZRX drive and cloned the original drive to it using ddrescue. The drive cloned OK, although there were about 8MB of errors. When I try to boot the TiVo, I can't get any kickstarts to work, and the TiVo is stuck in a GSOD loop. After doing some more reading, I realized that I do have a Gigabyte motherboard, which may have affected one or both of the TiVo drives.

If I run DvrBARS on the original drive, I get a file read error when I attempt a backup. If I run it on the new drive, I get an error stating "MFS volume header not found." Is there anything I can do at this point? Thanks for the help!


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## HerronScott (Jan 1, 2002)

You can request an image here - http://www.tivocommunity.com/tivo-vb/showthread.php?t=388695

Scott


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## Xerxes3rd (Jul 3, 2015)

Will do, thanks!


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## unitron (Apr 28, 2006)

Xerxes3rd said:


> A friend of mine gave me her old TiVo Premiere XL TCD748000 that wasn't working. I bought a new 1TB WD10EZRX drive and cloned the original drive to it using ddrescue. The drive cloned OK, although there were about 8MB of errors. When I try to boot the TiVo, I can't get any kickstarts to work, and the TiVo is stuck in a GSOD loop. After doing some more reading, I realized that I do have a Gigabyte motherboard, which may have affected one or both of the TiVo drives.
> 
> If I run DvrBARS on the original drive, I get a file read error when I attempt a backup. If I run it on the new drive, I get an error stating "MFS volume header not found." Is there anything I can do at this point? Thanks for the help!


The motherboard should only have put a Host Protected Area on what it considers the "first" hard drive, which would be the Primary Master if it has an IDE/PATA header, or SATA 0 otherwise (which Linux would see as /dev/hda or /dev/sda).

So if you installed a drive to that "first" position and then booted and loaded Windows or whatever originally, it would already have put the HPA on there before the installation CD booted and it should still be there, and if you didn't disconnect that drive to hook up either the source or target TiVo drive, you should be okay as far as that's concerned.

What did you boot with to run

ddrescue

?

(I'm trying to see if you've got something with

hdparm

on it)


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## Xerxes3rd (Jul 3, 2015)

Indeed, I disconnected my primary hard disk (SATA SSD with Win7 on it) and connected both the original TiVo drive and the new (blank) drive. The original TiVo drive showed up as /dev/sdb and the new one as /dev/sda, so I would assume that the motherboard would have put the HPA on the new drive, which should've been overwritten by ddrescue.

I booted from the latest stable Ubuntu Live via USB with persistence, then compiled ddrescue from source. I did this because Ubuntu Rescue Remix wouldn't boot on my system.

I'm guessing the original drive was too far gone by the time I got my hands on it. Even though ddrescue only found ~8MB of errors, I would imagine that it's possible the drive had other issues. At any rate, I got a fresh image on the new drive and it's humming along happily.


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## unitron (Apr 28, 2006)

Xerxes3rd said:


> Indeed, I disconnected my primary hard disk (SATA SSD with Win7 on it) and connected both the original TiVo drive and the new (blank) drive. The original TiVo drive showed up as /dev/sdb and the new one as /dev/sda, so I would assume that the motherboard would have put the HPA on the new drive, which should've been overwritten by ddrescue.
> 
> I booted from the latest stable Ubuntu Live via USB with persistence, then compiled ddrescue from source. I did this because Ubuntu Rescue Remix wouldn't boot on my system.
> 
> I'm guessing the original drive was too far gone by the time I got my hands on it. Even though ddrescue only found ~8MB of errors, I would imagine that it's possible the drive had other issues. At any rate, I got a fresh image on the new drive and it's humming along happily.


I wouln't have expected the HPA to be overwritten because I'm pretty sure that's set in the Flash RAM on the paddle board and not just on the drive.

I hope it doesn't come back to bite you later.


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## Xerxes3rd (Jul 3, 2015)

I hope not as well! After all this work, however, I learned that contrary to my previous understanding, this TiVo doesn't have lifetime service. I'm now unsure as to what I want to do with it, since it's only a 2-tuner model.


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