TiVo Community Forums Archives - Cannot replace hard drive successfully

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Cannot replace hard drive successfully
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Posted by: ursapooh

I have a Sony DirecTiVo. Recently one or both of the two previously upgraded hard drives started making the dreaded clicking sound and my TiVo soon died. I bought two new drives of the same size and make, took both old drives out and used the dd command to make copies of each onto the new drives. I did get read errors while copying. But I have done this same procedure now a few times and I always got errors. The only difference between this time and the last few times is that it didn't work. When I put the new drives in the TiVo and booted up I get to the "almost there" screen then it reboots. I did the procedure twice. Am I missing something?

Posted by: Robert S

'Almost there' means Linux has loaded, but the TiVo software has failed to load. This means either the B drive is missing, or the MFS set is corrupt. If you're sure the B drive is being seen OK, then try booting with just the A drive. When you reconnect the B drive and switch on you may get the green screen of death, which may be able to fix the problem.

Posted by: ursapooh

Thanks for the advice. I got the same issue when only booting from A with B disconnected though. Any other ideas?

Posted by: Robert S

The point was, when you reconnect the B drive, the TiVo may GSOD.

Posted by: ursapooh

Sorry. I didn't understand. So I tried to boot without the B then tried to boot with the B and I did get the GSOD. However the GSOD cycles as well. I get the "Powering Up," "Almost There," GSOD, then reboot all in about 45 seconds. Is this what I should be seeing? Should I just leave it alone to see if it can repair itself or is the GSOD reboot cycle an indication that it won't repair itself?

Posted by: Robert S

That's not a good sign. Do you have enough swap? Consider doing the 'rescue' from the third post of the Fixes thread unless you're sure you have 127Mb of swap.

It takes several minutes for the GSOD to allocate the memory it needs for such a large drive set, so it's not doing any useful work at the moment.

Posted by: ursapooh

I didn't think swap was an issue since I have two 120GB hard drives and I thought that was under the threshold for requiring bigger swap. But I did the repair you pointed me to. Both my partitions were mountable so I assumed the one with the oldest dates was the inactive one. In this case it was hd4. mkswap threw an error but from the posts I assume that is normal. pdisk threw an error as well when I pressed "y" to confirm writing the changes:

pdisk: Re-read of partition table failed. (Device or resource busy)
Reboot your system to ensure partition table is updated.

Was this caused by me leaving the partition mounted? I then put both disks back into my TiVo and I still get the same GSOD cycle.

What next?