# Replacing HD in Series 2 - dd is taking FOREVER



## ericholtman (Oct 2, 2003)

My 300Gb upgraded drive in my RS-TX20 is failing (shows skip on replay, sometimes menus slow or hang). No problem, I'm fairly good with computers....

I purchased a new 320Gb drive. 

I downloaded the bootable Linux CDROM image, and burnt it.

I booted up an older PC I use mainly as a file server for my network. I removed its regular drive, and had my old Tivo drive as Primary Master, and new drive as primary slave. 

When I booted the mini-Linux, everything seems right:

/dev/hda reports 300Gb, /dev/hdb reports 320Gb.

Since I'd like to preserve all the shows, thumbs and passes, I figured I'd just do the direct copy.

On Friday night around 8pm I launched the
dd if=/dev/hda of=/dev/hdb bs=1024k

On Saturday morning, it had copied 140k blocks (about 140Gb).

On Saturday afternoon, it had only made it to 150k.

Now (Sunday, 5pm) it's only up to 175k. 

Is there something I didn't do in my config? Is it not using DMA, and it should be? Or is it just really really really slow because the drive is failing and I'm constantly having to reread sectors.

I'm tempted to punt, plug the old drive back in, and use Home Networking to suck off the shows I care aboutm and then just trying to copy over the smaller setup from the Hinsdale FAQ.


Any clues?


Thanks,


Eric


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## Pauli (Mar 1, 2004)

I believe you need to use the "hdparm -d1 /dev/hdx" command on both drives to enable DMA mode prior to performing the direct copy command. You should also put the source and target drives on separate IDE controller channels (i.e. one as Primary Master and the other as Secondary Slave with the Optical drive as Secondary Master). That should speed it up quite a bit.


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