Hey, just so you know ... this post is now about 14 years and 2 months old. Please keep that in mind as it very well may contain broken links and/or outdated information.What is it with me and hard drive crashes lately? First the drive in my Linux server dies, then this past Sunday the stock 250gb drive in my TiVo Series3 went bad.
The crash first manifested when the TiVo froze with a pinkish tinted picture on the TV. This has happened occasionally in the past, and the pink hue is usually an indicator of an HDMI signal issue so I pulled the plug and let the box reboot. Unfortunately, the TiVo got stuck on the “Welcome” screen and never went to the “Almost there” screen which pointed to a hard drive problem. I figured it was most likely the attached 1TB Western Digital Expander, so I unplugged the expander and let the box reboot again. Same problem, which confirmed it was the internal drive that was bad.
Luckily I had a spare 320gb SATA drive sitting around, so I figured I would just make a backup of the failed drive and restore it onto the spare. I pulled the TiVo out of the home theater stack, opened it up, and connected the drive to my PC. I tried using WinMFS to back up the drive, but discovered that since the drive was “married” to the expander, the software couldn’t make a backup without the expander attached as well. I don’t have an eSATA port on my PC (I’ve since ordered a cable from Monoprice) so that wasn’t going to be an option … I decided to just clone the drive. I connected the old drive and new drive to my PC and then booted the Ultimate Boot CD. From there, I used the EASEUS Disk Copy utility to perform a sector-by-sector copy of the 250gb drive to the 320gb drive.
After about two hours, the copy completed. I put the new drive back into the TiVo, crossed my fingers, and plugged it in. It got to the “Almost there” screen, which meant it was now loading from the hard drive. Then, the Green Screen of Death, which was actually a good sign. The disk copy had indicated 94 read errors, so I knew there were some corrupted sectors on the new drive. Since the GSOD was a sign that the TiVo was attempting to fix these problems, I let it go. Another two hours or so later, the box rebooted (again) and this time loaded all the way to TiVo Central, with all of my recordings preserved. Yes!
Unfortunately I’m missing out on the extra 70gb from the larger internal drive. According to the Drive Expansion FAQ, you can’t expand an internal drive when it’s married to another (the expander in my case). I guess at some point when there’s not a lot of recorded content that I care about, I’ll divorce the expander, clear everything, and then re-do the expansion so I’m able to use all 320gb. For now, though, the Series3 is back up and running.
I finally had a chance to divorce the Expander, then pull the drive and use WinMFS to enable all 320gb on the replacement drive. I also had to use WinMFS to re-marry the Expander as you can’t use TiVo’s plug-and-play method to attach an external eSATA drive if the internal drive has already been expanded. It was all relatively painless, so I’m up to 1.3TB of storage which will hold 190 HD hours. It’s the same exact setup now as my TiVo Premiere (320gb internal + 1TB external).
I got sick of having the Expander connected to my Series3 and decided to go ahead with an internal 1TB upgrade. I divorced the Expander, backed up the internal 320gb drive with WinMFS and then applied the image to the new 1TB drive. The WD10EARS drive I got from Amazon had a 25-SEP-2010 manufacture date, but I still had to use wdidle3 on it because it got stuck at “Powering Up” after I put it back into the TiVo. I also used HDDScan to set the acoustic management to 128.
I’m down to 157 (from 190) HD recording hours, but at least everything’s on a single internal drive instead of also spread across the Expander. One less plug in the power strip too. I might sell the Expander or re-purpose it and attach it to my NAS for more storage.
For more details on TiVo drive upgrades, check out the excellent Drive Expansion FAQ thread on TCF.