TiVo Community Forums Archives - Ack... Upgrade gone wrong

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Ack... Upgrade gone wrong
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Posted by: aciurczak

Hi all -

I just got two SAT-T60's to replace 2 SA's. I have upgraded 8 or 10 machines before, including 1 previous directivo. I upgraded both my new machines by adding a 120 GB maxtor to the original 40 GB, using MFSTools 2.0 (basically just taking the backup image, then using the mfsadd command to prepare the additional drive). Both of them were working fine for a few days, but when I went downstairs this morning, one of them is stuck at "cannot boot kernel". When I pull power, wait awhile, then try and reboot, it stays at the "starting up" screen for awhile, then hops to the "cannot boot kernel" message.

My plan later this afternoon is to rip the drives back out, restore the image, then readd the 120, and hope things work out. Is the "cannot boot kernel" message indicative of anything else, or is it most likely just a minor drive glitch?

Thanks,
- Alex

Posted by: Robert S

It's a pretty major glitch if it stops the machine booting! If you know what you're doing, upgrading isn't that hard - I would have to suspect the new drive.

You do know machines upgraded like this won't recover from green screen errors, don't you?

Posted by: aciurczak

hmmm.... i did read that other thread, but my eyes glazed over a couple screens in. since i'm just adding the 2nd drive, why would the swap on the first drive be affected? what would be a way to get a recovery from a green screen, blessing instead of mfsadd? not sure why that would be safer.

Posted by: Robert S

The green screen is mfsfix, the filesystem repair utility (rather like scandisk on Windows). It needs about .5 Mb of RAM for every Gb of drive space. If you do the math, 6Mb of RAM (what's free after Linux has loaded) + 64Mb of swap is enough for 140Gb. You're over that limit, so mfsfix will crash without resetting the 'damaged' flag on the partition, so you'll end up in a reboot loop

It's safer to use the big drive as the A drive (do a pipe transfer if you want to keep your recordings), then you can increase swap with -s 127 (MFS Tools 2.0 command option).

If you don't increase swap and your TiVo greens, you can recover it by using your inactive root partition as emergency swap, but this is always going to be /way/ hairier than increasing your swap when you upgrade.

So although you can use BlessTiVo (mfsadd is probably better - BT can bite you if you don't use it exactly right) to add a big B drive - and it will work, don't get me wrong - but if you go over 140Gb total your TiVo is less safe than it might be.

Posted by: aciurczak

Weird. The original 40 gig Maxtor in my new SAT-T60 fails maxtor's diagnostics. I don't want to send back the whole unit, so I think I'm going to sub in another 30 gig that I have sitting around to pair with the new 120, and I'll try and RMA the 40 gig through Maxtor.