TiVo Community Forums Archives - GSOD When Testing Backup Image?

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

GSOD When Testing Backup Image?
(Click here to view the original thread with full colors/images)

Posted by: Polcamilla

Sorry for all the threads. :S

The Story So Far...

I've followed the Hinsdale FAQ through Step 9 on my HDVR2 with no problems. Went to test the image on the new drive in the TiVo. Booted it up and after the 'Almost There, A Few More Seconds....' it went into the GSOD.

I've searched the threads in the Upgrade Center for GSOD and there seem to be a lot of different causes for them.

What I'm wondering in this case is should I let the TiVo sit to see if the GSOD resolves (it's been that way for about 1/2 hr by now) or should I unplug it and try again? Should I try restoring the backup image to the new drive again or is the backup image hosed? How concerned should I be....and what should I do now?

(I'm *really*, REALLY hoping to finish this upgrade tonight as I'm keeping a 3 yr. old locked out of the room with his train table *and* making my husband spend all his time holding a newborn---the husband will be back at work tomorrow, so I need to get everything back to normal and put away today or else I'll just be left with a broken TiVo and a disassembled PC all hastily shoved into the garage to get it out of the way of the children and it'll have to sit there for months on end.)

Posted by: Polcamilla

Well, after about 1 1/2 hrs, the GSOD cleared and it rebooted, only to hang at 'Almost there, a few more seconds...'. I let it sit that way for a while (about 10 minutes) then unplugged, checked all my cable connections (which were fine) and my jumper (set to Master), then rebooted again to the same result. Completely removed all the cable connections and reseated them, still the same result.

I'm begining to suspect I have a bad drive. :S

Posted by: Polcamilla

"It's only 15 minutes of your time and you *could* save $100."

.....so says my husband as I report my conclusions. Against my better judgement, I ran the whole upgrade process again, just in case it was somehow a mistyped Linux command or.....I don't know what. Everything looked fine in Linux and all my cables and jumpers were in order. But marriage is about compromise, right? Anyways, long-story-short---the 120 GB drive is in the TiVo *again* and *again* giving me the GSOD.

....and to think I had the original drive in and booting just fine only an hour ago. All I had to do was pop the cover on and things would've been fine in plenty of time to record Leno.

Posted by: direfan

So, are you replacing the drive or are you adding a drive.

Posted by: Polcamilla

Replacing a 40GB drive with a 120GB drive. I don't want to have to mess with installing a bracket and worrying about overheating and power supply issues. 100 hrs. of television is plenty for me. :)

Posted by: Polcamilla

*sigh*

Got a new drive, put it in my PC (running Win98, since I never mentioned that earlier). Reran the whole thing.

I *think* I might've made an error when I did it yesterday. I typed: 'mfsbackup -f9999' instead of 'mfsbackup -f 9999'. At any rate, I did the latter today and AGAIN I got the GSOD (using the new drive).

Linux reported no errors in making the backup or in restoring it to the new drive. I'm really at a loss here and could use some insight from SOMEBODY. Please?

Posted by: Polcamilla

*bump*?

Posted by: Robert S

-f 9999 is correct, but even getting it wrong wouldn't cause the problems you're seeing (that's the "missing backgrounds" one).

It's not obvious why the source drive works but the copy GSOD's and then gets stuck.

Unfortunately I think your only remaining option is to use dd and hope that enough makes it across for the copy to work:

dd if=/dev/hdX of=/dev/hdY bs=32k conv=noerror,sync

The 32k block size is a compromise for speed, if you're prepared to wait then omit 'bs=32k' for the best chance of getting all the data off the drive (but a substantially longer copy time).

If that doesn't work, then you're going to need to get a backup file from somewhere.

Posted by: Scalia

Do you have another PC you can try to use for this upgrade? When I did my upgrade, I used a Dell and got all kinds of strange error messages. When I switched to one of the PCs I built myself, the process worked much better. Of course, I didn't actually get the tivo working until I gave up and downloaded an image, but switching PCs might be a better option for you, if you have another one to try this with.

Posted by: Polcamilla

Thanks---I'm going to try this today (I had to wait until I had someone available to watch the kids!). One question---if this succeeds, could I make a backup of my image from the new drive using MFSTools or would it still most likely choke?

Posted by: Robert S

It couldn't hurt to try.

Posted by: Polcamilla

I'll let you know either way. Thanks for the help!