TiVo Community Forums Archives - Tivo stuck at powering up

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

Tivo stuck at powering up
(Click here to view the original thread with full colors/images)

Posted by: path

Newbie,

Playing around with my Sat-t60 and now it will not boot. Any suggestions?

Posted by: GREEK

reseat the flat white cable from mobo tot he supply. If you touched the supply with your hands you may have damaged it. Does it tick at all, or just dead, the tick should be loud enough to hear from 2 feet away......

Posted by: path

Screen stuck at:

Welcome. Powering up....

Posted by: Robert S

Sticking at 'welcome' is usually a drive failure.

Posted by: path

Can you fix a drive failure?

Posted by: Robert S

In principle, all you need to do is buy a new drive, download a backup and restore it to the new drive.

TiVo have just shutdown all the backup sites, so the 'download a backup' step is now much harder than it was.

Posted by: fkingpsuce

I've got the same problem on a DSR6000 that I upgraded a year or so ago. Are there any generic drive tools I can download to examine the two hard drives (pair of 120's) to determine which is bad? Once I determine which one is bad (if I can), is it worth reusing the second drive? ...or should I worry about it crapping out sooner than later?

TIA

Posted by: Robert S

All the drive manufacturers make a standard diagnostic utility available (Maxtor's is called PowerMax and also does Quantum drives) from their websites. However, it's not uncommon for these tests to pass a drive that won't work in a TiVo.

There's also DiskSpeed, which will catch some faults missed by the standard diags, but still isn't guaranteed to find the problem.

As a last resort, you end up having to restore an A drive image to both your drives so you can see how they run in the TiVo (and (you may be spotting a pattern here) it's not entirely unknown for a pair of drives to work happily in a TiVo on their own, but refuse to operate together, although that is very rare).

I wouldn't be unduly suspicious of the good drive.

Posted by: path

Could I have just corrupted the files tivo uses to boot? And merely need to replace them? Is that just one file, the rc.sysinit? I do not have a backup, but I do have a copy of the rc.sysinit file on my Windows machine.

Posted by: Robert S

Yes, if you were editing rc.sysinit, then that could have got into a state that prevents the TiVo booting. (I'm loving the way you leave it to this point to admit that 'playing around' actually meant editing rc.sysinit:)).

If rc.sysinit is broken it'll either have DOS-style line terminations (should've used ASCII mode to FTP it from the PC) or have the wrong permissions (chmod +x rc.sysinit).

Posted by: path

I've got a copy of the original rc.sysinit file which I have copied to a floppy. I'm not sure how to get it back into Tivo. Is there a way to view it and make sure it is Tivo compatible? Is it as simple as putting it back it the /etc/rc.d directory? My Tivo drive is back in a PC with no other drives attached and I'm booting from a CD I downloaded from 9th tee. As you may have quessed, I'm quite new to this Tivo, Linux thing. Thanks for your help.

Posted by: Robert S

mkdir /mnt/tivo
mount /dev/hdc4 /mnt/tivo [may be a different drive, or 7 instead of 4]
mkdir /mnt/floppy
mount /dev/fd0 /mnt/floppy
cp /mnt/floppy/rc.sysinit /mnt/tivo/etc/rc.d/rc.sysinit
chmod +x /mnt/tivo/rc.d/rc.sysinit
umount /mnt/tivo
umount /mnt/floppy

Something like that.

Posted by: path

I'm having problems with the second line. How do I know which drive and whether it is a 7 or a 4? Can you tell me what files I should see in the directory /etc/rc.d? Can the rc.sysinit file exist in any other location? Currently I only have two files in /etc/rc.d and they are rc.S* and rc.inet1*. Thanks again.

Posted by: Robert S

Usually only one of 4 of 7 will mount. If they both mount, the one with the newer files is the active one (don't you remember which is your active root partition from when you edited rc.sysinit?). I assumed you had your A drive plugged into secondary master, hence hdc.

/etc/rc.d will be the boot files in the RAM disk created by MFS Tools. When you mount the root partition, the TiVo's boot files will be in something like /mnt/tivo/etc/rc.d/

Posted by: m_todd

Have you actually been playing around with the rc.sysinit file in any way? If so, you may have set its attributes so that it won't execute!

I did just this last night by mistake ... I'd been messing around with the file, and eventually decided to go back to the original I'd had on the PC. I completely forgot that the default was to have the file unexecutable and the TiVo wouldn't boot (sticking exactly as you described).

I had to take the HD out of the TiVo, put it in the PC and do a "chmod 755 /etc/rc.d/rc.sysinit" ... hey presto, the TiVo booted just fine.

Posted by: path

I think my problem is I do not see any files in /etc/rc.d other than the two metioned above. I'm using the ls command after loggin in as root. I am looking at this wrong? I do not have a backup. Can I get a backup image somewhere?