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Help! am I doing something wrong?
Authored by: joshMV4 on Sep 15, '05 01:19:42PM
I would like to use this hint to attempt to get back some bad data on my dvr's hard drive. It crapped out on me about a month ago. This sounds like the right tool, because the dvr hard drive is an unkown format an unreadable file system by my mac. (1GHz G4, OS 10.4)

Before I tried the bad drive (120GB), I installed a smaller working 10GB drive into my DVR and recorded a few minutes. Then I removed the drive and installed in my mac. I typed the command and 45 minutes later I had a 10GB disk image on my computer. OS X still couldn't mount it, though. I formatted the 10GB hard drive to "erase" the dvr contents, then used dd again to go back from the dmg file to the hard drive. It appeared to be working, but it didn't finish within an hour so I went to bed. By the next morning, it was finshed. I stuck it in my DVR and it worked!... My dvr read the show I recorded previously.

Excited I might have a fix for my bad drive, I installed it into my computer the next morning an repeated the command for the faulty 120GB drive. It qickly made a 10MB dmg file and the terminal said something like "input/output error" 77000 bytes read, 77000 bytes written, then it would freeze up my mouse with the spinning beach ball.

I restarted my machine with a hard power off and back on and tried again. The same thing happened 3 more times, doing a hard power off and back on (this has now locked up my mac more times in 10 minutes than I have had in the 2+ years I owned it). The last time I let it go all night (still not done) and all day at work to see if maybe it is working, just not letting me multitask. I haven't been home yet to see.

Any thoughts? When I first inserted the disk, OS X wanted to initialize the "new" hard drive, so the "bad" hard drife is somewhat functional....

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