TiVo Community Forums Archives - Failed adding second drive.

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Failed adding second drive.
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Posted by: Thess

I've kind of given up on this, so it's not urgent, more that I'm curious what went wrong.

I received a used 60hr SA TiVo (TCD140060). The drive was corrupted (or something), when I got it, so I restored an image from the community here using mfstools under the standard boot CD. That went fine, although there were some other issues that required a Clear and Delete Everything (as a side note, I think there might be something off about the current image that is made available for this model).

But after that, everything was peachy. So I pulled the drive again, put it back in the PC along with a Maxtor 40gig drive I wasn't using, and attempted to "add" it using the mfsadd command, for a total of 100hrs. That seemed to go all right; the correct hours were reported by mfsadd, I unmounted everything and put the drives back in the Tivo.

Stuck forever on powering up.

Rearranged the jumpers, just in case. No go.

Removed the "B" drive. A drive no longer functions by itself, just cycles back and forth between "powering up" and "a few minutes more".

I read the Hinsdale instructions quite thoroughly and I'm fairly sure I didn't do anything obvious like get my drive designations mixed up under Linux. Any other input on what might have gone wrong?

Does the second drive need to be formatted in any way before being added? I guess I assumed (perhaps incorrectly) that mfstools took care of all that stuff?

Restoring the original image to the A drive worked and now I'm back at square one.

Posted by: weaknees

Sounds like the new drive you added may be bad. Check that 40 with PowerMax and see what it says.

Michael

Posted by: Robert S

It does sound like a hardware problem with the B drive - it's preventing the TiVo from getting to the A drive. That might be a cable or jumper issue, but sometimes drives just don't get on.

The 'Clear and Delete Everything' thing is an unavoidable consequence of using an image from a different TiVo and does not indicate a problem with the backup you downloaded.

I suggest you make a fresh compressed backup (from the pair of drives, naturally) and restore that back to the A drive. Then see if you can get the TiVo to boot with the second drive, but /without/ marrying it to the A drive.

If you can't, then there's no point expanding the image on to that drive.

The manufacturer's diagnostics can test the drive's electronics, which might give a clear indication of a fault.