The annoying part here is that I just replaced a failing drive back in February by buying a pre-formatted replacement drive from DVRUpgrade.com -- and the drive they sent me went bad in eight and a half months.
Turns out they only offered a 6 month warranty, but I mailed them anyway ("Come on, guys, 8 months to failure? Seriously?") Their answer was, "Get fucked." "See if the drive manufacturer will replace it, send the new one to us, and then we will charge you again to copy a new image onto that drive."
Nice.
So now I have a decision to make.
Option 1: Borrow someone's linux machine, figure out how to get MFSTools running on it, try to use that to copy the failing drive to a new drive, and pray. (Because apparently Macs can't read Tivo partition maps, so I can't just rsync or dd the fucker.)
Option 2: Just pay these asshats another $300 for a new pre-formatted drive, re-enter all of my season passes, and hope this one lasts longer than eight months.
I know -- I KNOW -- that Option 2 is the right thing to do. I know it deep inside the place where good decisions come from. But Option 1 is still so viscerally tempting because it infuriates me to give more money to people who have already ripped me off, even when the amount of money is small enough that it is far outweighed by the amount of hassle that not spending it would cause.
Computers are stupid and my indignance is trying to sabotage me.
In related news, I understand that the new HD DirecTivo is still on track for release in mid-2009. Har har har.
Incidentally, recent investigations show that "just torrent everything" is still a shittier experience than the increasingly-shitty experience provided by SD DirecTivo.
Update: In case you're curious, I ended up cloning the dying 750gb drive onto a spare 1tb drive I had lying around using ddrescue and that seemed to work fine, geometry be damned. So, yay. Without repartitioning it (which I think would require Linux-based indignities) I'm missing 1/4th of the drive, but who cares, I've never filled the thing anyway.
