TiVo Community Forums Archives - Upgrade failed, continous reboot

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Upgrade failed, continous reboot
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Posted by: darc87

Using Hinsdale FAQ.

I have a factory dual drive (2.5.1 software) unit which according to upgrade faq info is a married two drive unit (B drive was blessed) which I have created a divorced copy via (-6so). Everything seems to work fine. I have created a 400+/- meg tivo.bak file. Next I restore it to a 80 gig Maxtor drive, again everything seems to work fine. I put the drive into my tivo unit as master and try to boot the system. I get recorder starting up, followed by almost there..., then it roboots and follows the same sequence. When I put my original 2 quantum drives back in the tivo, everything works fine. Any thoughts?

FYI:

Drives are not locked and jumpers are set correctly. I have tried 2 different 80 gig drives with the same results.

Posted by: Backhack

I ran into this when I tried to downgrade my sony svr2000 couldnt get the dual drive divorce to work you may need a single drive image. wait till others post that know more about this. :(

Posted by: Tiger

I have recently gotten a copy of a backup with this problem and am analyzing it to figure out what is up. I think I have a general idea what is happening at this point. But that does not mean I have a general idea how to fix it yet.

Posted by: darc87

Well thanks to a helpful member of the Tivo community, I am up and running with 2-80 gig drives. Basically had to use a 14hr single drive image to get everything to work. Next is setting up my Tivonet card.

darc

quote:
Originally posted by Tiger
I have recently gotten a copy of a backup with this problem and am analyzing it to figure out what is up. I think I have a general idea what is happening at this point. But that does not mean I have a general idea how to fix it yet.

Posted by: trewitt

quote:
Originally posted by Tiger
I have recently gotten a copy of a backup with this problem and am analyzing it to figure out what is up. I think I have a general idea what is happening at this point. But that does not mean I have a general idea how to fix it yet.

I have a factory dual-drive Philips PTV-300 (two 15GB drives, married).

I tried
backup -so - | restore -qi -
(not exactly according to hinsdale, but the same effect) to copy the two drives onto a single 80GB disk and ended up with the same reboot cycle described by darc87 (gets to Almost there..., then reboots, forever). I've tried backing up to an image on disk, then restoring, with the same effect.

So, I'd be happy to ship the backup image to you (Tiger) if it would help (either by mail or over the net - I can put it up on the web). And, if you need another person to test any fixes, I'd be happy to help with that, as well.

(At this point, I'd consider a 2.5.1 single-drive image, but I'd still like to help with the testing.)

Posted by: thtv01

I am getting ready to attempt an upgrade to my parents SA Tivo and noticed that it already has 2 drives also. I was wondering if I can just use the backup image that I created from my SA Tivo. They are both Phillips 312's however mine only had one drive so the upgrade was simple. I thought I remembered reading something about not being able to use an image from another SA Tivo with V2.5. Meaning that the image is somehow tied to the specific Tivo that it came from. Is this true or am I mixing something up.

I haven't checked to see if it is a true factory dual drive or just a single with a blessed drive. I'll do that shortly.
This kind-of sucks because originally they had a SA Tivo with a single drive but their modem died and they had Tivo replace it. Tivo them sent them an old original Phillips 312 that has 2 drives.

Tiger do you think I should just wait a little while and see if this problem gets figured out or should I go ahead and attempt the upgrade?

Any help would be greatly appreciated!
I have already upgraded my SA & DTivo with no problems and I would like to thank all responsible people for their wonderful contributions.

Thanks,
Tim H.

Posted by: darc87

quote:
Originally posted by thtv01
I am getting ready to attempt an upgrade to my parents SA Tivo and noticed that it already has 2 drives also. I was wondering if I can just use the backup image that I created from my SA Tivo. They are both Phillips 312's however mine only had one drive so the upgrade was simple. I thought I remembered reading something about not being able to use an image from another SA Tivo with V2.5. Meaning that the image is somehow tied to the specific Tivo that it came from. Is this true or am I mixing something up.

I haven't checked to see if it is a true factory dual drive or just a single with a blessed drive. I'll do that shortly.
This kind-of sucks because originally they had a SA Tivo with a single drive but their modem died and they had Tivo replace it. Tivo them sent them an old original Phillips 312 that has 2 drives.

Tiger do you think I should just wait a little while and see if this problem gets figured out or should I go ahead and attempt the upgrade?

Any help would be greatly appreciated!
I have already upgraded my SA & DTivo with no problems and I would like to thank all responsible people for their wonderful contributions.

Thanks,
Tim H.

Use your Single drive SA Image and all will work fine. Thats's exactly what I did. I'm now running Dual 80 meg drives without any problems.

darc

Posted by: thtv01

darc87: Was the image that you used to upgrade on V2.5 or an earlier version?

Posted by: darc87

quote:
Originally posted by thtv01
darc87: Was the image that you used to upgrade on V2.5 or an earlier version?

I used a 2.5.1 14hr image provided by a very helpful fellow tivo user. Any SA image should work.

Posted by: thtv01

Cool, thanks darc87. That sounds like the way to go. If I can fit the upgrade in between a few football games tomorrow then I will just use my single drive image for the upgrade.

Thanks again and have a happy new year!

Posted by: BenButler

I'm having the exact same problem with the
continuous reboot.

I had an 80 gig A drive, and then I 'blessed'
and added a second B drive. (This B drive had already
been working as a B drive bfore I took it
out before sending to electric legs for him to fix my
modem and add more memory. ((THANKS ElectricLEgs!!!:D :)

When I got my unit back, It had a new 80 gig A drive in it
as a single drive. I went to bless and add back in my 80 gig
B drive, and Tivo only recognized
the second B drive as a 13 gig drive, so I decided to
jump into the waters and retore a backup onto the
A drive, TivoMad expand the two drives so I could
get 149 hours out of both 80 gig drives.

The only way I could get the back up utilility to run
mfstoool backup -6so was to hook up both
drives and run the dual drive command. This did
create a backup file called tivo.bak. However,
once restored to a drive this file failed to boot. It just
keeps spinning and rebooting, saying "wait a few minutes"...
Im going to try to find a 'virgin' 14 hour back up on the
web somewhere and try to restore that onto my
A drive so I can start from scratch as if it were a factory
new unit. Can anyone point me to one?
Or email me a iso image? That would be fantastic.

What did I do wrong :confused:

Thanks again to all the Tivo Wizards out there.

Ben

Ben.B@home.com

Posted by: SteveGrimm

I ran into the same thing when I tried to move my blessed two-drive standalone to a single large drive today. Gets to "Almost there" then reboots.

Luckily I backed up my original 1-drive onto a bunch of CD-Rs, so I'm going to try restoring that image onto my new disk then using TiVoMAD. Not looking forward to re-downloading the 2.0 upgrade but hopefully it'll work.

Posted by: BenButler

>Im going to try to find a 'virgin' 14 hour back up on the
>web somewhere and try to restore that onto my
>A drive so I can start from scratch as if it were a factory
>new unit. Can anyone point me to one?

I have Phillips Tivo. Is there an image of a
a 2.5.1 14hr image out there? I think it probably
has to be specifically for a Phillips.
Several posts have suggested that the way to
get around this "Almost there.... " loop is
to go all the way back to an original 14 hour
image.

(This will mean that I have to go cmpletely through
guided setup again right?))

Many thanks, Ben
Ben.B@Home.com

Posted by: dberger

quote:
Originally posted by Tiger
I have recently gotten a copy of a backup with this problem and am analyzing it to figure out what is up. I think I have a general idea what is happening at this point. But that does not mean I have a general idea how to fix it yet.

I'm nearly at the end of my 90 day warranty (it was a deal with my wife, long story) but I've seen a fair amount of hassle in upgrading what I'm fairly sure is a dual-drive 2.5 unit (DSR6000).

I've also seen at least one report that doing a factory reset before the backup results in a sucessful upgrade - but no one has coroborated that.

Have there been any breakthroughs in the past few weeks?

Posted by: BenButler

dberger,
I cant help you with your question as Im not
sure about dual drive systems.

I had a complicated situation
where I had an expanded tivo (13gig and 80gig).
I tried to do the modem repair and ram install
myself, but no go, close but no cigar.
I sent it off to ElectricLegs
[mailto:electriclegs@sobservers.com]
for modem repair and
RAM upgrade (like I shud a in the first place)
with just the A drive and he also
switched my 13 gig to an 80 gig A HD. When I got the unit
back, I went to add the second B drive back in
using BlessTivo, it only recognized it as a 13 gig
drive...? Dont know what happened but I'm sure
it was my screw up. Anyway, when I went to
do a backup and then TivoMAD exapansion, it was behaving
as other people described with the infinite reboot.

I had to find an original 14 hour virgin backup that
booted (mine didnt!) A kind soul on the internet let
me download theirs It was rather large at 240 megs,
(Thanks SythLord!!!!).
Once I restored the virgin back up and tested it,
I was able to run TivoMad expand/bless on both
and it worked.

Now I finally have a 32 meg tivo, a working modem
on a wireless phone jack, and
2 80 gig drives (196 hours @ basic) - yea!

Hope this explanation helps others with the
same circumstance.

Send your stuff to [mailto:electriclegs@sobservers.com]
if you need it worked on!!!!

Thanks to all the really clever folks who figured it
all out in the first place. My hats off to you all! :D !!!!

Ben

Posted by: Marconi

As of 1/3/02, evening, I too have a constantly rebooting TiVo. It instructed me to leave it alone for 24 hours, not to unplug it or try to reboot it myself.

This followed a partial install of TiVoNet. I had the TiVo out of service to do the hardware part of the installation and put it back into service with the Ethernet card installed and powered on, but before pulling the A drive to do the software setup. The card came preconfigured and tested from 9th Tee.

I had assumed that the card would simply be ignored until I had time to pull the drive, put it into my PC and do the necessary software install and configuration. This was, apparently, a bad assumption.

When I powered the TiVo back on with the card installed nad connected, TiVo rebooted numerous times in succession. At that point, I unplugged it and removed the TiVoNet and Ethernet card, hoping that this would cure the rebooting problem. Unfortunately, after plugging it back in, the rebooting continued and then the "Severe Error" screen came up telling me to leave it alone, plugged in and with the phone line connected for 24 hours. If, after 24 hours, the TiVo has not rebooted, it said, I am to contact tech support.

Can anyone tell me what I'm in for?

Posted by: thtv01

dberger: The problem with dual drives is only with the Stand alone Tivo models not the Direct-Tivos like the one you have.
If you follow Hinsdale's How-To you shouldn't have any problems.

I upgraded my dual drive Sony DirecTivo without any problems at all and tons of other people have done the same.

Good luck!

Posted by: lalocp

Maybe this will help....

I ran into the same problem when I restored the backup of my 14 hour Tivo.

I have an original 14 hour philips expanded to 45 hours @ basic (A-13.6GB, B-30GB).

I used the kazmyr cd to boot and mfstool to backup using -6so options. My tivo.bak was about 500MB. After restoring to another 30 GB drive and putting that single drive in my Tivo, I got the same problem of a continous reboot.

I recreated the backup exactly the same way and I finally got it working. The problem with my initial backup was that I had not (really stupid of me) powered down the Tivo. I placed the Tivo on Standby and after displaying the instructions on how to power backup, I disconnected the Tivo and proceeded with the backup.
Worked great after that.

Worked fine after that.

Posted by: Tiger

Actually you are really not that far off... Though in your case, putting it in standby mode you just got lucky, as that does not actually do anything as far as the software is concerned. However, doing a reboot from the menu, then pulling the power after that MIGHT make backups work better. This is entirely conjecture though and untested. But it does seem like a problem that could go away at random times from what I've seen.

Posted by: lalocp

Couldn't it be that by placing it in standby mode Tivo will properly unmount the partitions?

Otherwise when booting up in a PC, the drive isn't checked if it was umnounted properly (no file system check?) whereas the Tivo will run some cleanup on it if it detected that it wasn't unmounted properly?

Posted by: Tiger

Standby mode doesn't do anything on TiVo except blank out video and enable RF passthrough. So it doesn't "unmount" anything.

The way MFS works, it needs to do very little to check for consistency. It just has to check the log of recent filesystem changes and re-play them. Now this is the root of the reboot issue. Sometimes a log entry will reference something in a newly divorced partition. This confuses MFS and causes the reboot. Even fsfix is not able to fix it, because it, like all MFS things, tries to replay the transaction log, and gets confused, rebooting. And that is the root of the problem. I had previously just ignored the transaction log because, in theory, it will work even with the changes I make. But apparently I was wrong, and occasionally there is a difference. So basically now I am left deciphering the format (Which is non-obvious) to figure out if there will be a problem, and if there is, remove the log entry.

Posted by: SteveGrimm

Would a plausible workaround be to unplug the CATV cable and let it sit for a little while before powering down to make the backup, so any changes have a chance to get synced to disk? Alternately, maybe the "restart the recorder" option cleans up the filesystem before rebooting.

If this is a "happens sometimes, not others" kind of thing, at least there is the option of going through the backup/restore process several times until it works, putting the original disks back in the TiVo for a while each time it doesn't work.

Posted by: BenButler

hummmm.... I was able to get my SA tivo working with 2 drives (after finding a virgin 14 hour backup and
using it to create a single drive back up, then using tivoMad
and bless to expand and add a 2nd drive). It was working
for a week.

Much to my surprise, it started going
into the endless reboot.... what???? I unplug the unit
and went to pull the drives to redo everything and noticed
they and the unit was quite HOT. On a whim, I left it
alone for a day, plugged it in and got past the almost there
screen and to the green screen of death, the severe hardware
failure screeen. I left a lone, and viola, its back.... working
fine... again? is this just now a heat problem?

B

Posted by: Haps

Well you can chalk me up as another of those unsuccessful Dtivo upgrades.

Phillips DSR6k(30GB+15GB). Followed the instructions and did back up etc. Restored to an 80gig drive to test and it continously reboots.

Posted by: tangent1138

Quick question from a newbie --

If you use put someone else's 14hr tivo image into your 2 drive SA tivo, don't you loose your life time subscription? Or is that married into the hardware?

I'm trying to back that up so I don't loose it in case of a hard drive crash.

Posted by: trewitt

No, you don't lose your subscription. That is tied to the hardware.

quote:
Originally posted by tangent1138
Quick question from a newbie --

If you use put someone else's 14hr tivo image into your 2 drive SA tivo, don't you loose your life time subscription? Or is that married into the hardware?

I'm trying to back that up so I don't loose it in case of a hard drive crash.

Posted by: jmoyles

My roommate discovered that the tivo was clicking this afternoon, and wasn't responding to the remote.

Rebooted the tivo, and got the screen cycle (tivo starting - just a few more seconds and then recycle).

Tried to use mfstools to backup the A drive, but it fails right away.

Put my backup tivo A drive in the pc, and tried mfstools again (thinking I could work from the backup), but the backup drive is totally dead....

Is there any chance I could beg a copy of a virgin backup from someone?

- John
jmoyles@cdre.com

Posted by: jmoyles

Should have mentioned that it is a Phillips PTV-100. :)

- J

Posted by: deebo

check your pm

Posted by: fedward

quote:
Originally posted by Tiger
Actually you are really not that far off... Though in your case, putting it in standby mode you just got lucky, as that does not actually do anything as far as the software is concerned. However, doing a reboot from the menu, then pulling the power after that MIGHT make backups work better. This is entirely conjecture though and untested. But it does seem like a problem that could go away at random times from what I've seen.

DING! DING!

This just worked for me. I have a factory 2-drive combo (DSR6000R) and made a backup (-6so) on Sunday, and then restored it to my new drives today. I've never had a problem with mfstool before so I didn't bother to check if it would boot before running the tivomad utility (maddt4b). The alternate root that the tivomad utility installed booted just fine, but after the reboot all I got was a frozen TiVo.

So I restored my original backup again and tried it in the TiVo without a second drive, and got the reboot loop.

So I reinstalled my original (noisy) Quantums one more time and did a system restart and pulled the plug. The backup and restore were successful.

Drives are 2 80GB Seagates (5400rpm U6), and they're much quieter than the whiny lct15 drives that were installed by Philips. System Information reports "up to 146 hours."

Now to fill it up with Olympics coverage while I have a houseguest ...