TiVo Community Forums Archives - Philips DSR6000 & Restoring from Image

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Philips DSR6000 & Restoring from Image
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Posted by: bruceredd

OK....I am begining to feel like an idiot.

Long story short -- My Philips DSR6000 DirecTiVo died after I unplugged it without hitting the standby button about a week ago.

I have downloaded and tried both the DSR6000-2.0-2DR & DSR6000-2.0-40G images to no avail.

I have tried using MFSTools 1 and 2..........

I have tried every possible combination I can think of (I have even kept track of what I have tried on paper as to not waste time)

Here is what I think should work but is not:

Drive Config:
Primary Master/hda - Fat Drive w/ DSR6000 Image on it
Primary Slave /hdb - New Drive to write image to (tried both WD and Samsung)
Secondary Master/hdc - (Optional) New Second Drive to write 2DR image to
Secondary Slave/hdd - CD-Rom

I am booting from the MFSTools 2 Boot CD -- And when it asks I am hitting <enter> for the default boot.

Here is what I am doing next:
#> mount /dev/hda /mnt/c
#> /mfstools-2.0/mfstool restore -zpi /mnt/c/tivo/Phillips_DSR6000_2.0-2DR.bak /dev/hdc /dev/hdb

I then reboot the machine and boot from CD. When it asks I now select "Swap" so that I can look at the drive.

When it starts trying to read the partitions of the /dev/hdb (the newly imaged drive) it gives me all kinds of errors. And if I boot <enter> (with no swapping) when I view the dmesg it gives me the 9214 1492 error message.

As I said, I have tried this on two brands of drives with both the 40GB image and the 2DRV image with both single and dual drive cofigs and it refuses to work.

Can anyone offer any insight?? I have spent about 8 hours trying to get my TiVo working. :confused:

Thanks,
Bruce

Posted by: grecorj

why would you have to hit "standby" before unplugging TiVo? doesn't sound like that alone would "kill" your TiVo....

Posted by: bruceredd

From thumbing through the many posts in the community it appears to be a relativly common problem.

--Bruce

Posted by: Robert S

What sort of feedback do you get from MFSTool when you do the restore? Does it give you any error messages? Can you do a backup of the newly restored drive?

Does your original A drive still spin up? Can you see the partitions on it? Can you make an MFSTools backup from it?

You shouldn't expect to see anything meaningful on a TiVo disk without byte-swapping (for the original models, anyway). You should be able to mount hda4, hda7 and hda9 from a TiVo boot disk, and view the partition table with pdisk. What error messages do you get when you try this?

If your old A drive still works, can you do a dd copy to the new one? If it doesn't work, what error messages do you get?

Have you tried running any disk diagnostics on these drives?

Is the BIOS is reporting the drive sizes correctly?

You don't have to press standby before you unplug a TiVo. Standby basically just blanks the video output, the TiVo is still on. Care to link any of these 'relatively common' posts you found?

It is possible that something broke when you plugged the TiVo back in. If it did, there's no particular reason to think the hard drive is what failed.

Have you tried the 'two lights test'? Plug the TiVo in and then hold down pause on the remote. TiVo should do a hardware self-test. Both amber lights coming on indicates a pass.

Posted by: bruceredd

I gave up.......UPS picked up the unit about two hours ago.

To my amazment Philips gave me an Exchange Number. They claim that once they receive the unit they will ship me a replacement (not repair this one) in 2 to 5 days.

As soon as I told him that it was hanging on the please wait another minute screen he spit out that the hard drive was bad.......

This being the case, why was the 120GB Maxtor drive I bought this morning getting past the powering up screen and then about 30 seconds later rebooting??

ALSO, -- using several different boot disks I was never able to view the contents of ANY of the disks with an Image loaded on them (This includes the original drive). Whenever I tried to mount any of the partitions it would tell me that I must specify the File System Type. This I certainly do not understand. I tried swapped, no-swapped and everything else under the moon.

But, if I get lucky I will have a new (or previously repaired) TiVo back from Philips by the 24th or so.

Posted by: Robert S

My impression is that the something on the motherboard failed, probably relating the the hard drive controllers.

Although electronics usually fail completely, partial failures are possible. It appears that enough was left working to boot Linux off the drive, but not more than that.

Partial failures can be weird as they depend on how combinations of devices work together, so it's not impossible that different drives, with slightly different interface characteristics behave differently.

I think it's a good call swapping the unit, I think if it was a disk problem you would have fixed it already.

Posted by: bruceredd

Cool.....I don't feel quite so bad. I wish Philips and/or TiVo would have suggested I do the "two lights" test. Funny how they don't even care to check. Makes you wonder how many they have with the same problem....... Are there so many with problems that they just have people ship them in for replacement rathre than spend money troubleshooting on the phone?

Thanks for you input =)