Axiom Home Page Forums General Discussion The Water Cooler OT:Help! Busted TiVo!

My TiVo's crashed a couple times in the last few days. I had originally thought nothing of it, but now it happened while I was watching, and it made some rather nasty clicking noises, then locked up. I'm thinking the A drive is failing-no real way to be sure, but it is older. Anyway, I just opened the box, and looked at the power supply, which has pale peach goo on bits and pieces of it. I figure it's just glue, but has anyone looked at their TiVo power supply and seen such stuff?

Also, has anyone successfully recovered programs from a dying drive on a TiVo?

Yeah, yeah, I'm an IT expert (theoretically), but it doesn't hurt to whine about my problems!

I openned my DirecTiVo a few times. I don't remember messy glue, but I do remember that the power supply was exposed....no housing at all, but I knew that was normal from the reading I had done.

I don't know about retrieving stuff off of the drive, but I do know you can get replacement drives.

Yeah, I'm going to start trying to recover stuff after I finish my dinner. It's definitley the original HD. I found a site that sells replacement drives with OSes, so I'll do that if I have to. I'm not giving up my lifetime subscription!

With the new drives, you won't give up your subscription. The system's serial number is in the motherboard, the OS picks that up.

I assume this is a standalone and not a D*Tivo?

One option is to see if the drive is still recoverable. Some HD Tivo owners have used SpinRite at Level 4 to revive failing drives. It might help get it operational. Then you can back up the drive. On the Tivo Community forums, there are links to all kinds of tools, like InstantCake, IIRC.

I've used Weakknees for a drive upgrade, they're reliable. So is PTVupgrade, 9th tee is another option. You can also ask one of these vendors for original, pull out drives, drives that they pulled out of units that were eventually upgraded.

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Some HD Tivo owners have used SpinRite at Level 4 to revive failing drives.

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All hail Steve Gibson.

Bren R.

Excellent. Thanks, guys! If I can't get the Tivo image off the drive, I'll probably do Weaknees. They seem to have decent prices and a good website. Hopefully I'll be able to get everything... now that I've got all the other drives lined up. (I was having serious problems with that last night) The bad drive's cooling in the freezer over a bed of dessicant.

Mmm, tasty!

Well, I got the image off the TiVo, which I got to boot after trying 3 times. I'm trying the plain old dd copy now to see if that works. If it doesn't, I think I'll probably throw in the towel and just restore the image. Sigh... 3 seasons of West Wing, down the drain...

Just think of all the free time you'll have now!

I hate you.












Also, my wife wants to know exactly how long you guys survived without your DirecTivo... a couple weeks? a month?

Three months, which is the maximum time DirecTV allows you to suspend service. It was great not having to pay the bill. But now I have both NetFlix AND DirecTV...

Peter, what Netflix service plan are you using and how long does it take for them to send a movie(s) to your house? I'm thinking of starting an account with them and I'd like to hear some do's and donts from your experience.

I have not been without TiVo or a DVR in 5 years....the last 2.5 have been dual tuner units.

Netflix is great....I used to have the 3 disc plan.

If you have a distribution center close by, when Netflix mails a disc, you could have it the next day.

I have the three-disc plan. No need for more than that. I have a two-day turnaround time on my discs. If I drop a disc in the mail on Wednesday, I get my next on Friday.

I work in San Jose where Tivo HQ are, if I drop a disc in the mail early in the day, I usually get a replacement the next day. If I send it from home, about 30 miles from San Jose, it takes 2 days.

The best thing about Netflix IMHO is the selection. Far better than any store I have ever been to.

I've also had Tivo for 5+ years, couldn't live without it. I never archieve anything in it though. I watch and delete.

I've heard you can buy a standard ATA hard drive and format it to Tivo's proprietary format using a utility that is widely avialible on the internet. Cheaper than buying a Tivo specific HD.

Thanks for the input gentlemen. I'll have to try it out and see how long turnaround will be in Fresno.

I'm a watch-and-deleter, too. I only have 35 hours or recording time but I never run out of space. I just don't watch that many sitcoms or TV dramas, which is what really gets you.

TELL me about it... Anyway, the direct dd copy didn't fix it, and I'm not willing to shell out $90 to fix the drive, so I'm going to try Knoppix and dd-rescue. We shall see... Then I'm going to wipe both drives, throw in the pair of 120s and start from scratch. Sigh.

wait, you're going to re-use the bad drive?

No, sorry, the original 60 GB is bad. I've got an extra 120 lying around, so I'm going to use that along with the 120 I installed a couple of years ago.

So you'll now have around 295 hours of recording time. That's obscene!

yaaaas....

The real pisser of it was that I was planning to do this anyway, just hadn't gotten to it. Goes to show I should stop putting stuff off.

Geez, what's in that thing? A pair of 300s?

HD Tivo. Original is 250G and I added the 300G from Weakknees. I never miss a show, even in HD...

Aha. Geez, after I posted that, I thought I was way off. I guess not...

IT WORKS! Wuaaah! IT WORKS! <dances around a la Doc Brown>

dd_rhelp is a marvelous program. If someone needs help recovering a hard drive, I highly recommend it. My procedure was decidely non-standard (I think) but it worked just fine. I'll give details if anyone is interested.

What is that program? I only know of Spinrite.

dd_rhelp is a shell script that calls dd_rescue. dd_rescue does a block level copy, and basically doesn't take no for an answer; if it can't read something, it writes 0s instead. dd_rhelp sets it up so that if it encounters a bad block, it moves that block to the end of the process, and skips to the next good block. When I tried to run dd_rescue yesterday, it got caught at 7 GB of data, and pretty much tanked overnight. I think it wrote about a gig of 0s before I stopped it. dd_rhelp actually managed to get the whole drive with no errors (!) I have no idea how.

Oh yeah, it's also GPL (ie, free)

i sound like a linux expert, don't I?

Well, I'm certainly not... I've got some UNIX experience from MacOS X, but little to no Linux. More after doing all this mess...

ddr_help was unable to rescue the data from my crashed drive a few months ago. It did give me a large disk image, but I couldn't mount it.

Bummer. I copied straight to another drive instead of trying to image. I don't know if that helped or hurt. Also, I'm sure bugs could crop up in the programs (I've already seen a little stuttering). We'll see.

Wait. My memory has come back to me. It was Adam's dead drive that we were able to make an image of (but not mount). Mine wouldn't stop chugging and clicking long enough for the OS to recognize it.

Perhaps we would have had luck with his drive if we'd imaged it directly to another one.

You were doing dd_rhelp on the Mac, then, right? I think with Knoppix it doesn't try to mount the drive (at least in text mode) unless you specifically order it to (which I didn't do at any point).

dd_rhelp doesn't mount the drive either, Ken. It just creates the disk image, which I then (unsuccessfully) tried to mount.

Oh, I know, but if you're doing it in OS X, OS X automatically tries to mount the drive. Just trying to define the variables for myself, really.

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It did give me a large disk image, but I couldn't mount it.

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Ewwww.

Some people really love computers too much.

Oh, you have no idea...