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Lockup woes
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Posted by: Kendall

I have a blessed 30 hr Phillips unit which suffers from pauses, freezes, lockups, etc. My first plan of attack is to add the ATA-66 cable but I received a belkin cable with all three connectors that have the 20 pin hole filled in so I have to get a replacement cable. My question is, what are my options for scanning and correcting possible harddrive errors on the drives after installation and blessing? In my rush to add the extra space I did no scanning of the Maxtor Diamond 60 drive, but would like to be able to scan both the Quantum and the Maxtor drives.

I can get a bash prompt and have some linux experience but anything beyond basic use, the need of descriptive instructions would be helpful.

Thanks,
Kendall

Posted by: pschum

A small heated needle will open the blocked pin 20 on the motherboard end of the cable without problem, and your drives probably are missing that pin anyway, so you needn't worry about the other two connectors.

As for the rest of it, there's not a lot you can do ON your TiVo. If you made a backup, I assume you're using it as your "A" drive. Run the various drive tests on your new "A" drive and the Maxtor "B" drive, recopy the original "A" to your backup, re-bless the "B" drive and maybe the problems will go away.

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Paul Schumann
"Share and Enjoy"

Posted by: Kendall

I did a backup to file and am using the original Quantum drive. I'm thinking there are errors on either or both drives. I can pull both of them and format them FAT so I can run scan disk via Windows but I was hoping someone had compiled disk utilities for the TiVo/Linux so I could run them without removal and restore. The restore doesn't scare me just the fact that the inital setup takes 6-8 hours (DirecTV).

Thanks,
Kendall

Posted by: mewtoo

quote:
Originally posted by Kendall:
I have a blessed 30 hr Phillips unit which suffers from pauses, freezes, lockups, etc. My first plan of attack is to add the ATA-66 cable but I received a belkin cable with all three connectors that have the 20 pin hole filled in so I have to get a replacement cable. My question is, what are my options for scanning and correcting possible harddrive errors on the drives after installation and blessing? In my rush to add the extra space I did no scanning of the Maxtor Diamond 60 drive, but would like to be able to scan both the Quantum and the Maxtor drives.

I can get a bash prompt and have some linux experience but anything beyond basic use, the need of descriptive instructions would be helpful.

My 14Hr + 60Gb Maxtor was experiencing lock ups & reboots. I could cause a reboot by forcing nightly call. The only way I was able to fix it was to re-clone A drive & re-bless B drive (Both maxtors, original A drive is my backup) I'm guessing that, in my case, the database on the A MFS partition was damaged (A restore of partitions 1-10, and rebless of B did not fix the problem).

Hope that helps.

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-- "The number of UNIX installations has grown to 10, with more expected." - The UNIX Programmer's Manual, Second Edition (June 1972)

Posted by: HTH

quote:
Originally posted by pschum:
A small heated needle will open the blocked pin 20 on the motherboard end of the cable without problem, and your drives probably are missing that pin anyway, so you needn't worry about the other two connectors.

It is worth mentioning that if you unblock this pin hole that you make sure you plug the connector in correctly. One of the purposes of the blocked pin hole is to prevent you from connecting the cable rotated 180 degrees. Some cables which use the blocked pin method to ensure proper connection don't have the tab that matches up with the notch. See Murphy's Law: "If there are two or more ways to do something, and one of those ways can result in a catastrophe, then someone will do it."

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http://www.war-of-the-worlds.org/tivo/HTH.gif

Posted by: dotorg

When I upgraded my 30 hr unit to 134 hr, I took the time to properly scan and test the new 85 gig drive. I decided at the last minute to clone the 30 gig drive, rather than doing a CD backup, and I used the backup in the unit. I totally forgot to scan the 30 gig drive though, and a bad spot got through.

How I solved it was to set the unit to record a ton of half hour shows and wait for it to hang. When it did I made the assumption that the bad block was in the show that only partly recorded. I set Tivo to keep that show until I deleted it manually, and deleted everything else. It hasn't hung since then, but if I play that saved show, it'll hang. Problem solved, as far as I'm concerned, and I only lost a small amount of disk space.

I'd go back and reclone the drive again but I'd lose all the learning the tivo has done, and thats such a pain in the ass. This works just as well.

Posted by: Mocktar

If you continue to use the disk (without saving a bad show) TiVo will eventually mark that spot as a "Bad Sector" and will stop using it. The way you are doing it now is ok I guess but you shouldn't have to do that. It may take several times of writing a show to that spot before TiVo marks that sector but it would be worth it to me to have the system clean.