How to copy External DVR drive

[Lou_Weegie_B]

I have a 1.5 TB external Seagate drive connected thru eSATA to my Fios DVR.  The drive has performed fine for over a year and recently started to show signes of problems. 

I want to replace this external drive without loosing all the stored programming while I still have access to its contents. 

Is it possible to copy the contents of the old external drive to a new external drive and continue to use it?

I purchased a 2 TB drive for this purpose.  My initial attempt at making a copy was unsuccessful, and after a reformat I was able to get the 2 TB drive to be recognized but blank.

[armond_in_nj1]

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@Lou_Weegie_B wrote:

I have a 1.5 TB external Seagate drive  ... Is it possible to copy the contents of the old external drive to a new external drive and continue to use it? ...

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Short answer: No.  The only way to preserve recorded material is to make a real-time copy to a DVD using another device.  In general you will lose the HD but unfortunately there is no other solution. 

BTW this topic has been covered in the forums many times, so search the forums if you want further detail.

[Lou_Weegie_B]

You should be able to make an exact copy with a sector by sector copy program.  I am not trying to rip the drive or programing as most of the people probably are asking.  I just want to replace the failing drive with an exact copy. 

Everything I see in the forum is asking to rip the programs.  Not make a disk copy.

[tns2]

Can't think why such a copy wouldn't work

[armond_in_nj1]

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@Lou_Weegie_B wrote:

You should be able to make an exact copy with a sector by sector copy program.  I am not trying to rip the drive or programing as most of the people probably are asking.  I just want to replace the failing drive with an exact copy. 

Everything I see in the forum is asking to rip the programs.  Not make a disk copy.

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"Should" is not going to work.  However when you do this successfully, please let us know because there are very many individuals who want to be able to do this.

[thetguy]

Ok... I just sucessfully cloned (Byte for Byte) copied my failing external drive to a new external drive.  My new drive happened to be exactly the same kind of drive drive (1.5TB Seagate).  I am a Mac user, so after researching, I bought "Drive Genius 3" for $99 and used its simple interface to duplicate the failing drive.  I could see the drive on my Mac (using "Disk Utility" that comes with the Mac) but couldn't see any of the drive volumes (because of the proprietary FIOS drive formatting).  No matter, since Drive Genius saw the drive, it could be duplicated.  It took about 16 hours and I was worried today when it said the duplicate failed, but now I think that's just because in doing its checking it couldn't recognize the formatting.  I turned off and unplugged the FIOS box, plugged in and powered up the external drive, plugged the power back to the FIOS box and turned it on.  After going through its startup, the FIOS box perfectly recognized all the programming that had been recorded on the failing drive.  DONE!  (If you are a PC user, just look for an application that can do a byte for  byte drive duplication).  I hope this helps.

[bwh1]

Did you have to first install/format the new drive on the DVR so that the DVR didn't see it as a new drive and reformat after you had made the copy?

[weq92f]

Clonezilla would do this as well and for FREE.  That is, as long as you have a machine with an eSATA port or the cables and such to connect your old and new drive simultaneously.

My laptop has both USB 3.0 and eSATA so I could envision using USB3 to connect the new SATA drive ( with a USB 3.0 to SATA converter/cable ) and using the eSATA port to connect the old drive, then fire up Clonezilla and do device to device copy.  You can even configure the software to skip bad blocks on the old drive.

Hth,

-klb

[thetguy]

No, I did not have to pre-format the new Drive in the DVR.  I just plugged it in to my Mac (external eSata cable enclosure that I put the drive in), and had the old drive in another eSATA enclosure plugged into my mac.  Then I did the copy (the full copy even copies the formatting).  So far on this thread, I think I'm the only person that has actually done the cloning of the DVR drive (and I'm happy to say it worked).