TiVo Community Forums Archives

TiVoCommunity.com
(c)opyright 1995-2005 All rights reserved
indexcheckTC
This area is a static history of posts in the TiVo Community Forum Archive.
This archive history was made for the simple indexing of search sites like Google.

Pages:1

Bad Tivo?
(Click here to view the original thread with full colors/images)

Posted by: Rumpy

I have a 40 hour series 2 AT&T Tivo that I successfully upgraded with an 80G B drive over a year ago. A few months ago I began to see the occasional pause/glitch error that seems to be indicative of a bad hard drive. Recently, the frequency of these errors has increased, by a lot, and I am now beginning to see more major errors where half of the screen goes black or becomes a smear of the image, and occasionally I get a high-pitched beep that seems to come from the TV, not the Tivo itself.

I was able to run the Seagate diagnostics on the B drive, with no errors, but although powermax showed the A drive as being attached, it did not show up in the ‘select drive’ window, so I was not able to run tests on it. I assumed if the newer Seagate was good, then the older Maxtor must be bad, so I replaced it with a new 120G Western Digital drive.

I downloaded the latest version of mfstools 2.0, made a backup image, (not easy under WinXP with SATA drives), used dd to copy the old A to the new A, and ran mfsadd as described in the current Hinsdale How-to.

I now have two problems.

Problem 1: mfsadd returned 127 hours, (the original size of my 40+80 HDs), with a “Nothing to add” error. I tried every thing I could think of, (which admittedly was not much), and always got the “nothing to add” error. I returned the drives to the Tivo, (Which did boot, whew), and it reports 142 hours, not what I would expect from a 120+80 drive configuration. Is it possible to undo and redo mfsadd?

Problem 2, The big one: I still see the same major errors as before. It only took a few minutes of buffered live TV to see the whole image macro-block, smear, and freeze.

Do you think the Seagate B drive is the problem, and Seatools just missed it, or is there a deeper problem with my Tivo? If it is the old B drive, can I just go back to running my original A or did running mfsadd on the new drive change B also? I really want to keep my recorded programs if at all possible, so my next move will likely be to go back to the original 40G A drive, and use Mfstools to dd the 80G Seagate to the new 120G WD. Will that work, and do you think it will solve the problem?

Posted by: Robert S

It certainly sounds like a hard drive problem, although be aware that over-heating can cause identical symptoms.

You /might/ get away with going back to your original A+B, but if you've been making with recordings with your new A then you probably ought to dd it back on to the original drive to respect the 'marriage'.

You could try running DiskSpeed. I /think/ it's OK to run the B drive under XP as the boot block isn't used on that drive. DiskSpeed is sensitive to the speed of a drive, whereas the diagnostics tend to just check that the correct data is read, however long it takes.

Posted by: Rumpy

I do not think it is thermal. That was my first thought when the little problems first began, so I have the Tivo on wooden riser blocks, (to allow more air flow under it), and it’s on its own shelf. I have also kind of kept an eye on the temperature over the last few months, and have never seen any thing above normal. Will DD Allow me to copy the 120G drive back to the old 40G? Actually I guess it doesn’t really matter now. I tried restating with the original A and B drives, and after a few cycles, I got the GSOD, I think Tivo did record one or two things in the night, so I guess that may not have been the best idea. Once/if it returns from GSOD, I will try dd’ing the old B drive to the new 120G WD and see if that helps.

Seeing that I really do not know what I am doing, any and all suggestions are greatly appreciated.

Posted by: Robert S

If it recovers from the GSOD then there's no need to dd. If it doesn't recover it may well be completely dead and need to be reimaged from a backup.

Posted by: Rumpy

The good news is I am already back from GSOD and running on my original drive pair. Guess it’s time to try DD on the old B now and hope that fixes the glitches.

Posted by: Robert S

If you click Edit you can delete your duplicated post.

The point of the dd was to avoid the GSOD! If you dd now you'll get the GSOD again.

Posted by: Rumpy

I’m not sure I understand. Now that I am running on my original HD pair, shouldn’t I be able to upgrade, (replace), the B as described in the Hinsdale How-To? I assume now that Tivo is functional, the expanded A drive I created, (well, actually it didn’t expand, but that is a different problem) is no longer necessary, so I can treat it like a new, blank disk and use it to upgrade my existing B drive. Again, I am going on the theory that I have one bad drive, and since replacing A did not fix it, replacing B seems to be the next logical shot in the dark. Does this sound right?

Posted by: Robert S

Sorry, you're right. I misread what you said.