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I just thought I would pass on that I managed to copy a HR-21 disk that went bad and the new drive works great (better than the original) in my DVR.
My HR-21 had a 1-TB WD Green drive in it. I bought the upgraded system from Weaknees a few years ago. I noticed that the system was behaving bizarrely this year. It sometimes seemed to ignore the keystrokes on my remote and it would pause and skip during playback. It kept getting worse and worse over the last few months, so much so that it was nearly useless—even for watching live TV.
DirecTV said they could replace the unit, but that I would lose all my recorded shows. The repair guy I talked to said no one knew how to save the drive and that if someone came up with a way, they could make a lot of money.
So, I asked a coworker who is a PC tech if he had any ideas. He thought we might be able to copy it, so I bought a 1-TB WD Caviar Black drive (~$120) with the idea that I would use it in a PC if the copy failed. The WD Green drive that came with my HR-21 was only 5400 rpm and the Caviar Black is about the fastest 7200-rpm drive there is.
I pulled the old drive (thus violating my warranty) and plugged it and the new drive into an old PC with SATA drives in it. My friend booted off a thumb drive that had BartPE (a Windows preinstallation environment) and ran Norton Ghost. I could probably have run Ghost under ordinary Windows, but I didn’t have enough spare SATA ports, so I used the cables connecting to my regular drive. An examination by Ghost showed numerous bad sectors on the drive. There were three Linux partitions on the disk: system, swap, and data. We did a sector-by-sector copy of the three partitions. It took about 8 hours to copy the entire drive even though it predicted 6.5 hours. I suspect the bad sectors made it slow going.
I put the new drive in my HR-21 and connected it to my system. It came up just fine and all my shows were still on it. I see no freezes or skips while playing shows. Maybe the copy managed to recover the flakey sectors.
The added bonus is that the Caviar Black is so freakin’ fast! Even when my system was brand new, skipping forward and backward during playback was really bad. I would see a frozen image for a second or so thinking that was where it would start playing, but it was always off by several seconds. I wasted a lot of time going too far or not far enough and waiting for the freeze to thaw. It was really quite annoying and I blamed DirecTV for their crappy software. The TiVo I had before never did that. With the new drive, when I use the 30-sec skip (not slide), the show skips and starts playing immediately when I press the key. There is no 1-2 second freeze of the wrong frame at all. It just starts playing. Skipping commercials is now much less painful. What a joy!
I suppose the down side of using the faster Caviar Black is that it probably uses more electricity than the Green drive. But, now that the latest DirecTV software puts my DVR to sleep automatically, it will only be using more juice during recording and playback.
My HR-21 had a 1-TB WD Green drive in it. I bought the upgraded system from Weaknees a few years ago. I noticed that the system was behaving bizarrely this year. It sometimes seemed to ignore the keystrokes on my remote and it would pause and skip during playback. It kept getting worse and worse over the last few months, so much so that it was nearly useless—even for watching live TV.
DirecTV said they could replace the unit, but that I would lose all my recorded shows. The repair guy I talked to said no one knew how to save the drive and that if someone came up with a way, they could make a lot of money.
So, I asked a coworker who is a PC tech if he had any ideas. He thought we might be able to copy it, so I bought a 1-TB WD Caviar Black drive (~$120) with the idea that I would use it in a PC if the copy failed. The WD Green drive that came with my HR-21 was only 5400 rpm and the Caviar Black is about the fastest 7200-rpm drive there is.
I pulled the old drive (thus violating my warranty) and plugged it and the new drive into an old PC with SATA drives in it. My friend booted off a thumb drive that had BartPE (a Windows preinstallation environment) and ran Norton Ghost. I could probably have run Ghost under ordinary Windows, but I didn’t have enough spare SATA ports, so I used the cables connecting to my regular drive. An examination by Ghost showed numerous bad sectors on the drive. There were three Linux partitions on the disk: system, swap, and data. We did a sector-by-sector copy of the three partitions. It took about 8 hours to copy the entire drive even though it predicted 6.5 hours. I suspect the bad sectors made it slow going.
I put the new drive in my HR-21 and connected it to my system. It came up just fine and all my shows were still on it. I see no freezes or skips while playing shows. Maybe the copy managed to recover the flakey sectors.
The added bonus is that the Caviar Black is so freakin’ fast! Even when my system was brand new, skipping forward and backward during playback was really bad. I would see a frozen image for a second or so thinking that was where it would start playing, but it was always off by several seconds. I wasted a lot of time going too far or not far enough and waiting for the freeze to thaw. It was really quite annoying and I blamed DirecTV for their crappy software. The TiVo I had before never did that. With the new drive, when I use the 30-sec skip (not slide), the show skips and starts playing immediately when I press the key. There is no 1-2 second freeze of the wrong frame at all. It just starts playing. Skipping commercials is now much less painful. What a joy!
I suppose the down side of using the faster Caviar Black is that it probably uses more electricity than the Green drive. But, now that the latest DirecTV software puts my DVR to sleep automatically, it will only be using more juice during recording and playback.
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