How to check/fix hdd with bad sectors

[arvesolland]

Hi,

I have a WD 250 GB hdd in my TIVO and my TIVO's reliablility has been very unstable of late. Usually I can go for almost a month and 95% of my recordings are fine, no problems at all. Then things start getting worse, sound dissapeares and video becomes jerky in my recordings and also while watching live TV. Sometimes the sound comes back by changing channels, but other times a reboot is needed.
My solution earlier has been to delete all of my recorded shows, and the TIVO would become nice and stable for a period of time again.
To me this sounds like a hdd issue, as the recording hits bad sectors or something similar like that....could this be the case ?

If so, I was wondering if there is a "proper" way/tool to format/fix the hdd so the possible bad sectors would be marked or fixed ?
Any suggestions ?

Thanks,

Regards

Arve

[Darren King]

This does sound like a classic case of a flakey hard disk.

Best thing I can suggest is pull the hard disk out and use a program to check the health of the hard disk. Seagate make one called SeaTools for their hard disks and I am sure Western Digital (your hard disk) make one for theirs as well.

Unfortunately however Tivo's cannot cope with a flakey hard disk and to my knowledge there is no way of marking the bad sectors for it to skip over them like you can in other operating systems.

[zollymonsta]

Thats what mine has at the moment... As long as I don't delete a show thats on the flakey bit, then its usually fine. I've just set it to a 'save until I delete' recording.

[petestrash]

Darren's right the TiVo doesn't have anyway of mapping bad sectors, and Zolly's method is pretty safe if the bad sectors are only in the MFS and not the file system.

We do however have a couple of tools for checking for errors on the TiVo without removing the drive.

mfscheck and fsfix. Both of these will check the drive, mfscheck will only check the recordings area and fsfix will check the system file area.

FYI, when running either of these your TiVo will freeze and stop recording shows. Reboot between each test.

Peter.