# Want to preserve recordings - reinstall OS or copy from bad drive?



## kwoolner (Sep 3, 2007)

Hi all,

I have a Toshiba SD-H400 (expanded to a 300 GB hard drive, but otherwise unmodified) that is not booting. After "Powering Up" appears for a minute or so, the video shuts off. Another minute goes by and "Almost There" appears for just a second or two before video shutting off again. 

Thereafter the video remains off, although if I press a button on the remote I hear the "bonk" of a command being rejected by the Tivo. None of the buttons, either on the remote or the front of the box, including the Tivo button, have any effect.

I've tried SpinRite on the drive, and it passed level 2 data recovery with no problem. I've copied the drive with winMFS to a brand new drive, but the new drive has the same problems.

There are recordings that I would like to preserve on the original disk, and from the drive diagnostics it appears that the drive itself is not hopelessly corrupted.

What I would like to do is either of the following:

1) Reinstall just the Tivo OS image, hopefully leaving settings and recordings intact.

or

2) Copy recordings from the problematic Tivo drive to a functioning Tivo. Since the drive isn't bootable, I would assume this would involve hooking it up to a PC and booting from a utilities that can identify the recordings on the hard drive and copy or FTP them off the drive.

I've tried a kickstart 57, and kickstart 52, and neither seems to have had any effect. Is there some other way I can either bring the existing drive to working status, or copy the recordings from it?

Thanks
Keith


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## classicsat (Feb 18, 2004)

Press TiVo, Menu,Power, or Live TV. Check the i/p switch. 

I suspect the TiVo is running fine, just the video outputs are not working correctly.


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## Carlton Bale (Dec 17, 2001)

If that doesn't fix your problem, your best best is to attach the TiVo drive to a PC, backup the shows to another drive, re-image the new drive, and re-insert the shows back to the new drive. The recordings will be encrypted at all times and can only be played back on the original TiVo, so you are not dealing decrypting recordings (talk of that is prohibited on this forum.)

Here is a link to full instructions. It take some time to do, but if you really want the shows and the drive is not fully functional, this is your best bet.


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## dwit (May 5, 2004)

Please let us know how things work out for you, as it will help if/when my Toshiba acts up again. I had the 9.1 update issues many experienced and ended up just reimaging and lost shows.


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