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No luck in the Underground: B drive space not used.
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Posted by: kevinm

I asked this in the underground and did not get any help. I was hoping someone here might have a clue how to fix this problem.

I upgraded my T60 over a year ago with an additional 80G drive. Since then it has been running 108 hour capacity very well. Last week I woke up to the dreaded "Powering Up" screen and searched all the newsgroups telling me to wait 5 min, then 10, then overnight, etc. It finally came down to the dreaded hard drive failure.

I removed the 40G fireball and tried to see it on my PC with mfstools and it was not visible. A friend then told me that I could take my original Tivo drive (saved) and now make an image rather than keeping it on the shelf. From here I could put back in the original with my 80G and be back in biz. Well.... not quite.

After making the image backup, I reblessed the 80G and put everything back together. After playing the jumper game and ensuring that they are all correct the Tivo did boot up at 2.01, but only said 35H. I did more searching and found this thread.
http://www.tivocommunity.com/tivo-v...goto=nextoldest

Sounded right, but I tried all the suggestions and I'm still stuck. Why does it say 35H still? Things I have tried:

o Forced an upgrade to 2.5.2 (no luck)
o Pulled the power on the 2nd drive to confirm they are married (they are) I get a blinking Powering Up screen with B unplugged
o I did try reblessing the B drive, but was worried that may corrupt an already married config.

Do I need to restore my original and try again....?

__________________
Believe only half of what you see and nothing that you hear. -- Norman Cousins

Posted by: GoldenTiger

Um, you said that the second hard drive failed. That means it DOES NOT WORK and must be sent in for warranty...

Posted by: Thom

Let's see if I understand you....

You removed your original A drive and copied it to a replacement A drive.

You installed the replacement A drive and a blessed B drive in your Tivo, and were running with 108 hours of capacity. The original A drive was stored away as a backup.

Eventually, your replacement A drive failed.

Using MFSTools, you made a backup image of your original A drive, then installed the original A drive and a newly blessed B drive in your Tivo.

Your Tivo boots fine with the original A drive, but does not marry to the B drive, so you only have the capacity of the original A drive, which is 35 hours.

I see 5 possibilities, with number 1 the most likely...

1. The re-blessing of the B drive did not occur properly due to byte swapping problems. Remember that the primary master (hda) drive is not byte swapped on most boot diskettes or CDs. Some boot CDs do not turn byte swapping on at all, you must manually turn it on or make a BlessTivo boot floppy that turns it on.

Bless the drive again, making sure you have byte swapping turned on for however the hard disk is connected (hda, hdb, hdc or hdd).

Read the documentation/on-screen-messages for whichever boot floppy or CD you are using.

2. The Tivo does not marry to the B drive because the original drive was already married to an extra partition on the A drive. This isn't likely since your replacement A drive was a dd copy of the original A drive.

You can make a divorced backup image using MFSTools, which unmarries the A drive. You have to explicitly specify the divorce on the MFSTool command line (I think it calls it shrink).

3. One of your cables to the B drive isn't fully seated/connected.

Disconnect/re-connect the cables.

4. Your jumpers are wrong.

Correct your jumpers. Do not use cable select. Explicitly put one drive as master and the other as slave.

5. Your B drive has gone bad during the process of removing/installing drives.

Connect the B drive to your PC and test it.

All this assumes it was the replacement A drive which failed and caused your problem, not the blessed B drive.

Posted by: kevinm

quote:
Originally posted by Thom

Your Tivo boots fine with the original A drive, but does not marry to the B drive, so you only have the capacity of the original A drive, which is 35 hours.

I thought it was married as the A drive would not boot by itself, but I think it was just "engaged".

Thom, #1 was the ticket. I took the defaults on the mfstools boot and it was the byteswapping issue. ugh! I figured if I used the defaults and hdb, everything was right. Combine that with the "Vegas married" look to the A drive. I was worried that if I reblessed the drive I was looking for trouble, but in the end, EVERYTHING WORKS!!

Thom, thank you for clarifying the issue. I was without a Tivo for a few days prior to getting it to 35h and my family was not pleased, after running for another few at 35h, I was not pleased with the short retention of shows (I had several movies on the original STID). I'm now back to the 108 and looking to take out insurance on this box :)

Posted by: Yike

*tag*

I followed all the upgrade instructions, no B drive capacity (120gb) added. Tagging this for investigation tomorrow night! (I suspect that the byte-swapping issue might pertain to me)