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Series 2: Failed backup, now TiVo is dead
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Posted by: Austinj

I have a 40 hour Series2 TiVo box. I recently bought 2 120 gb drives to upgrade it, along with the weaknees bracket kit. When I tried to create a backup image, it failed, and now when I try the original drive back in the TiVo, it hangs on the powering up screen. I'll try to go through my steps exactly as I did them.

I burned the MFStools onto CD, but did it incorrectly the first time (the cd just had the iso file on it, rather than a bootable image. Stupid, I know. :rolleyes: )

I have windows XP, so I made sure that hard drive was never connected at the same time as the tivo drive. I decided to use an old 8gb harddrive I had for the backup image. I started out with this config:
CD-Rom: hda
8gb: hdb
tivo40gb:hdc

That was when I figured out the cd didn't work, so I pulled the tivo drive, put my xp drive back in, burned the cd correctly, and tried again. By this time, I had read that MFStools or something doesn't like a cd rom as primary master, so the config became this:
8gb: hda
CD-Rom:hdb
tivo40gb:hdc
120gb:hdd

I think I reinstalled win98se on that 8gb at this time just to make sure it was formatted correctly, and I think the tivo drive was attached at that time. Not sure if that matters, but thought I better include it.

Checked the boot-up log, all drives were reported correct size, thus nothing was locked. From there, I followed the upgrade directions in the Hinsdale guide exactly:

mkdir /mnt/dos
mount /dev/hda1 /mnt/dos
mfsbackup -f9999 -6so /mnt/dos/tivo.bak /dev/hdc

I then got this error:

mfsbackup -6so /mnt/dos/tivo.bak /dev/hdc10: Success
MFS_load_volume_header: mfsvol_read_data: input/output error
mfsbackup: Backup failed to startup. Make sure you specified the right devices, and that the drives are not locked.

Like I said, the drives reported correct size, so they shouldn't be locked, right? I searched and found a couple of other incidences of this same error, but they were never really resolved it seems. Some people suggested it was due to a failing hard drive, but my Tivo was working fine before, and is only a few months old. I was super careful about setting jumpers correctly. I've tried using a few different configurations of which drive is master and slave and so forth, and changing the commands accordingly, but no avail. I tried using the 'dd' command (option 3 in step 7 of Hinsdale), and the command worked. It copied the tivo drive to the new drive, but every twenty minutes (to the second) it reported something about the tivo bootlog. I don't know how to read that, or if that is just a status indicator or something. The fact that it happened exactly twenty minutes apart seem to indicate it's a system function rather than errors, but I'm new to linux, so I don't really know. Anyways, the 'dd' took about 5 hours, and reported something like 19450+1 in and 19450+1 out. Not sure about the first number exactly, but they both were the same and they were both +1. The new drive would not boot up in Tivo, either.

I'm stumped. It doesn't seem like I could have damaged my original drive cause I haven't tried to do anything to it but read it, and I handled it very carefully (I'm no stranger to working on computers). Any ideas?

Sorry this is so long, just wanted to give any and all pertinent info you tivo gurus might need to help.

Posted by: Austinj

Well, after running diagnostics which showed nothing, I tried running MakeTivoBootable, and that fixed all my problems. The rest of the upgrade went without any problem. Just wanted to post that up in case any one else hits the same snag. Don't know if it'll work for you, but it's worth a try.