Three years ago I replaced the original single hard drive in my Sony SAT-T60 DirecTiVo with a 160GB drive and have been quite happy with the upgrade ever since (even with the 137GB limitation) until yesterday. Based on research I believe the clicking sounds and accompanying short screen pauses I'm starting to experience are due to my hard drive starting to fail - "bad sectors" I believe.

All of the upgrade guides seem to require/assume the procedure involves the original drive. Is it possible to switch out a previously-upgraded drive to a new 160GB drive (I've got an unused one at the moment)? I would like to keep my recorded shows if possible but obviously since my drive is starting to fail I don't have the luxury of being picky here. And can I upgrade the LBA/kernel to remove the 137GB limitation at the same time?

Or can/should I simply pull the drive, put it into a PC and run some type of disk checker or defragmenter to fix it and put it back in the unit?

Any assistance is greatly appreciated - thanks in advance!