TiVo Community Forums Archives - "Error playing a recording" after failed upgrade

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"Error playing a recording" after failed upgrade
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Posted by: defdestroyer

Hi,
I followed the Hinsdale upgrade instructions for my AT&T series 2 tivo.

I was adding a 2nd drive to my first, preserving all recordings. When I was done, the tivo would hang at startup as mentioned in the instructions. No amount of fiddling with master/slave or cabling would fix it.

So I decided to back off and try this again another day and being more rigorous about testing the cables, etc...

So, I attempted to restore my tivo.bak file onto my original A drive using the following command:

mfsrestore -zpi /mnt/dos/tivo.bak /dev/hdb

The tivo will startup correctly and show all my recordings, but when I play most of them, it immediately shows the "delete this recording now" prompt like when you're done watching a show, and then says "Error playing a recording. The TiVo DVR was not able to record this program because there was no video signal on the channel. You may have been trying to record on a channel that you don't receive." One show does play for about a minute but then just pauses.

Looking more closely at this restore step, since I have a Series 2 should I have done this?

mfsrestore -bzpi /mnt/dos/tivo.bak /dev/hdb

(the extra -b attribute)?

I'm going to try restoring again with the above command, but has anyone else had this problem? Is there a chance that I've lost my recordings?

BTW, where can I find detailed instructions on what these commands do? Following these newbie instructions is great until something goes wrong, so if someone can point me to more detail on what is happening under the covers with this stuff, that would be cool.

Posted by: DVDKingdom

I'm sorry to say it looks to me you have lost your recordings permanently. Doing a compressed backup will not backup recordings. That is why you see the "Delete this recording" right away only the index file that tells Tivo what it did record was saved not the actual recordings.

Details of what each option does are available by just entering the commands "mfsbackup", "mfsrestore", or "mfsadd" alone no options. That will cause a help screen to display.

Posted by: weaknees

DVDKingdom is right - your recordings are gone. When you do a backup without recordings, the partitions that hold the recordings are left behind, but the index file that tells the TiVo where they should be still exists. So the TiVo thinks the recordings are there until it tries to access them, at which point it discovers that they aren't, in fact, there.

Michael

Posted by: Robert S

The -b option just controls byteswapping. This is unnecessary unless you're using a backup created with MFS Tools 1.x (very unusual these days), but it doesn't hurt to include it.

If the byte order was wrong, the TiVo would stick at 'welcome', because the entire hard drive would be unreadable to the TiVo.

Posted by: defdestroyer

> DVDKingdom is right - your recordings are gone. When you do a backup
> without recordings, the partitions that hold the recordings are left behind,
> but the index file that tells the TiVo where they should be still exists.

Well, what I don't understand is when did the data corruption occur? Is it the 'mfsadd -x' step that did something? I'd assume that since the instructions for the upgrade step I used (upgrade #1) only mention backing up index files, the mfsadd steps wouldn't affect the recordings. Else why bother backing up only the index if restoring it does no good anyway? I have to say that if this is the case the instructions are misleading in that it makes the entire process seem recoverable.

So, how do I get my tivo back working again in the shortest possible steps? Do I just delete all my recordings through the normal TiVo interface, or do I need to do something more drastic?

Either way, thanks for the help so far...

Posted by: Robert S

The TiVo is working, isn't it? You just have a list of empty recordings to delete.

The index is included in the backup because it's tiny. On the original TiVoes the recordings would have survived what you did, but the Series 2's have a more complex drive layout and the recordings don't survive.

When the TiVo was upgraded, did it stick at 'welcome' or did it get as far as 'almost there'?

Posted by: DVDKingdom

defdestroyer

From how I understand things it was not the "mfsadd" command that caused you to lose the recordings. The recordings were lost when you restored the drive with your backup.

Posted by: DVDKingdom

Robert

Is the "mfsadd" problem that was experienced correctable?
If yes how could defdestroyer or anyone else fix that problem without losing their recorded shows.

Posted by: defdestroyer

> When the TiVo was upgraded, did it stick at 'welcome' or did it get as far
> as 'almost there'?

It stuck at "welcome".

Posted by: defdestroyer

> The recordings were lost when you restored the drive with your backup.

Hmm, it doesn't seem like the backup is very useful then, unless I'm missing something. What I thought was a recovery step actually destroyed my data.

I'd love to know why it might have stuck at "welcome", assuming my master/slave config was good and my cables are good (I'm at tivo v4.0, so it sounds like the drive locking thing isn't applicable). The only thing I could think of is that I transposed the two drive devices in the 'mfsadd' command, but I thought I was very careful and the output from the command looked correct (I added an 80Gb B drive to my 40 Gb A drive and the command said that my drive size had tripled).

Again, thanks for the help so far...

Posted by: Robert S

It's unlikely that mfsadd mis-fired. It's more likely that the B drive is blocking the bus so that Linux can not be loaded from the A drive (hence the question). I think that if he'd connected the new drive beside the A drive before running mfsadd, the same thing would have happened (normally the TiVo would just ignore it). Unfortunately, having used mfsadd to marry it to the A drive, you don't have the option to disconnect it because the A drive now needs the B drive to start the TiVo interface.

Assuming it's not a cable or jumper issue (that seems to be covered), I suppose dd'ing the B drive on to a different drive that is compatible with the A drive would allow the TiVo to boot.

The reason the recordings disappear is that TiVo put partition 13 at the bottom of the drive and partition 11 at the top. Although -p mimics this layout (putting the system and Guide DB partitions between the recording partitions), it puts partition 11 at the bottom, thus preventing the new partitions from lining up with the old.

Now that the partitions are in the order MFS Tools prefers, if you do it again (fill up with recordings, make compressed backup and restore it) the recordings would survive (probably).

Posted by: Robert S

Well, that makes me look like an incredibly fast typist!

To answer the new question you raised, mfsadd requires an A drive image in order to work, so if the B drive was blank (or, at least, didn't have an A drive on it), mfsadd would have halted with an error message. If you had put an A drive image on there to test your backup file, then mfsadd would cheerfully have added your old A drive as a B drive as this is a perfectly valid command.

Posted by: defdestroyer

Robert S,

Thank you for the very informative replies.

In order to try to re-do the upgrade I'm going to take my somewhat corrupted A drive and remove the invalid index entries with the TiVo interface. Then I'm going to place my new B drive on the IDE bus as slave and see if it boots (is there a way to remove the restored index from it, so I'm back from scratch?). If it does boot, then it sounds like my problem was due to the transposed drives in the 'mfsadd' command, since I did place the backed up tivo.bak file on that drive which you mentioned allows mfsadd to transpose the drives.

If that doesn't work, I'm going to restore the backup onto Drive B and use it as master and add drive A to it the new drive B (this is upgrade configuration #2 in the Hinsdale guide I used).

Using your info, it sounds like a more reliable and error-proof course would have been to:
- DO NOT backup Drive A. This is useless for Series 2 owners.
- DO NOT restore backup to Drive B and test it. This allows mfsadd to think its correctly adding B to A when its really adding A to B.
- mfsadd B to A
- boot with A and B drives, master and slave respectively.
- celebrate

instead of these steps which I followed from the guide:

- backup A drive
- restore backup to B drive
- test B drive boots and has index info
- mfsadd B to A
- boot with A and B drives, master and slave respectively
which I then backed off by
- restoring backup to A drive
corrupting it.

Make sense? I'll report back with my results, for closure.

Thanks again!

Posted by: defdestroyer

Hmm, re-read this and instead of this:

- DO NOT restore backup to Drive B and test it. This allows mfsadd to think its correctly adding B to A when its really adding A to B.

really meant:

- DO NOT restore backup to Drive B and test it. This allows mfsadd to think its correctly adding B to A when its really adding A to B, if the user fat-fingers the keyboard.

Posted by: Robert S

A backup isn't useless, but something that it would probably work on a Series 1 doesn't work on the original drive on a Series 2. The main function of the backup is to allow you to create a new A drive in the event that you suffer a complete drive failure.

I suppose it might be possible to recreate the original partition structure on the A drive (this would be easier if someone could post the output of pdisk -l) and then copy the system partitions (including the boot block?) and MFS App partitions from the B drive to the A drive and thus get the partition boundaries back where they should be. I've not tried it, but it seems to me that that would allow recordings not over-written by the mfsrestore to play. It'd be very fiddly, though.

Posted by: defdestroyer

> A backup isn't useless, but something that it would probably work on a Series
> 1 doesn't work on the original drive on a Series 2. The main function of the
> backup is to allow you to create a new A drive in the event that you suffer a
> complete drive failure.

Yes, I see your point. The documentation should probably be updated to include this nugget.

So, I reattempted my upgrade last night. Restoring my backup to my original A drive, and including my new drive as B on the TiVo IDE bus caused the TiVo to hang at the "welcome" boot screen, so yes, it seems like somehow the new B drive is blocking the bus somehow.

I restored my backup to my new drive, now as A drive, and added my old drive as B drive, and the TiVO successfully booted and showed my expanded capacity. Of course, my recordings were still lost, so I erased all of the recordings via the TiVo interface.

My new drive doesn't like being a slave on the TiVO IDE bus, but there are no problems when using it as a slave on my PC. Is this common? If so, I'd recommend adding a step to the upgrade procedure to test this configuration before attempting an "mfsadd" (per Upgrade #1 in the guide) on a series 2 TiVo.

Thanks for the help!

Posted by: The Kook

Hi all, I encountered the same problem when I swapped in a new A drive only, replacing my old A drive (which I just stored and will keep as backup). The first two of the recordings made after the swap show up in the now playing list, but when I try to play them I get the error message that the unit didn't receive a video signal and didn't record the program. So far, its only the first two programs recorded after the drive swap that give this error message, but I am concerned about the problem.

I started my fresh drive with the DTivo image from 9th tee, expanded the drive to the 120GB capacity with mfsadd, put on 25Xtreme then 252Xtreme, and other than this problem (and a local channel issue I will post about in another thread) everything was fine.

Any ideas would be appreciated.

Posted by: Robert S

Do a 'clear and delete everything' reset.