TiVo Community Forums Archives - Frozen at 'Welcome. Powering up...' (moved from Help)

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Frozen at 'Welcome. Powering up...' (moved from Help)
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Posted by: cael

[Previously in the main Help forum]

This is upsetting.

I bought my Sony SVR-3000 3 months ago, upgraded it and it's been working perfectly -- until this morning.

It's frozen at 'Welcome. Powering up...' -- unplugging it, letting it rest and plugging it back in didn't fix anything.

On power up, I can hear both drives beginning to spin, some drive seeks, and then the
'Welcome. Powering up...' screen flashes black momentarily and returns. The TiVo seems to sit there indefinitely after that.

I tried unplugging the slave drive from the ide cable (I don't know if a two-drive unit will boot with only the master/A drive, but I thought it might be worth a shot) but nothing.

I'm going to boot to the mfstools disc and see if either of the drives are completely hosed.

Is there a documented recovery process anywhere?

I would very much appreciate any suggestions. I'm fairly handy around a linux box, so feel free to offer technical advice.

thanks,

C

---

Update:

Okay, booting to the mfstools2 disk and running pdisk -l shows that each disk is at very least reporting appropriate partitions.

Are there any other tests I can perform?

Does the mfstools kernel not support mounting mfs? That seems like a major omission. A quick google returned Jonnydeath’s boot CD, I suppose I'll try that. I'd really like to get a look at the logs.

Posted by: cael

Okay, that boot disk didn't cut it either.

I'm running out of ideas.

Posted by: Robert S

Thats suggests either an A drive failure or an IDE interface failure. The A drive should be able to get to 'almost there' on its own (it can't boot all the way up to the TiVo interface without the B drive).

The logs are not in the MFS partitions, they're in the log directory in partition 9 on the A drive. 'Welcome' is printed by the boot PROM and is replaced by 'almost there' when Linux starts to run its boot script, so your TiVo is not getting to the point where logs can be written.

The drive manufacturers all make diagnostics disks that can be downloaded from the support sections of their web sites (Maxtor's PowerMax now does Quantum drives too). If that finds a fault the drive can be returned under warranty.

Did you make a compressed backup when you did the upgrade?

Posted by: cael

Thanks for your input, Robert -- good stuff.

Yes, I made a backup, I just didn't want to overwrite either of my drives if I didn't have to. Looks like I'll likely lose my recordings anyway though, so I might as well try restoring that backup onto my original A drive.

If partition 4 and 9 of the A drive weren't MFS, I wonder why I couldn't mount them from the mfstools2 kernel.

Okay, I'm off to try restoring that image.

Thanks again,

C

Posted by: Robert S

Well, only one of partitions 4 or 7 would mount on a new drive. Partition 9 should always mount. However, I have seen posts reporting problems mounting the system partition from the HDVR2 using Kazymyr's kernel, so presumably the SVR-3000 has the same problem. Like I said, though, I doubt you'd learn anything from reading the logs anyway.

Posted by: cael

Scanning my new, larger A drive using Maxtor's powermax diagnostics tool returned an error code -- good call.

Damnit, I wish I had saved my Season Pass listing.

Thanks for your help,

Cael