TiVo Community Forums Archives - Welcome Powering Up

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Welcome Powering Up - hard drive?
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Posted by: dr_mal

First things first: I've done a search and read lots of threads on this subject, but couldn't find exactly what I was looking for.

I'll try the short story here:

Sony SAT-T60. 2nd 80gb drive added last month. No issues.

Added TurboNet card 3 days ago and installed YAC and TivoWeb1.9.3 No issues.

Installed TivoWeb 1.9.4b3 (oops -- deleted a show, need that undelete!) and Tivo Control Station yesterday. No issues.

Get home from work today: TiVo is stuck at "Welcome Powering Up..."

Crap.

I mount the drive in a spare PC, check out my rc.sysinit. Looks good. Try it in the TiVo again. "Welcome Powering Up."

Crap. <Search> Oh, it's hasn't even read rc.sysinit yet. Double crap.

With the drive mounted in a spare PC, I can read and write to partitions 4, 7 and 9.

General consensus on the forum is that my symptom indicates hard disk failure. If that's the case, why can I still access the disk in my PC?

Thanks in advance...

Posted by: Robert S

I had a similar experience with a DOA drive. I could access it (lots of read errors, but it worked eventually), but TiVo wouldn't boot.

Have you run diagnostics on the drives?

If you disconnect the B drive, do you get to almost there? (pull the plug as soon as welcome disappers).

Posted by: dr_mal

OK, tried disconnecting the B drive, same problem. :(

<edit -- removed after doing a search>

I'm looking for powermax now so I can run diagnostics. I'll post with the results.

Posted by: Robert S

The manufacturers provide diagnostic utilities to help decide whether a drive needs to be returned. The Maxtor one is called PowerMax (or PowerDiag) and I think it does Quantum drives too.

Posted by: dr_mal

Extreme weirdness.

I ran the first 3 tests in PowerMax.

1) Installation Confirmation: All passed. SMART test - "drive pre-dates SMART".

2) Basic Quick (90 Second) Test: Passed up until SMART test which fails with error 354S57. www.maxtor.com has no information about 354S57.

3) Advanced Test (Factory Re-Certification): Passed with message: "Your drive is certified error-free"

So if the drive is in fact error free (as the advanced test claims), why will my TiVo not get past the "Welcome Powering Up" message? I'm still confused as to how I can access the drive in my spare PC just fine, but my TiVo refuses to boot. And what could've happened while I was at work today to cause this problem to appear? Argh!

And yes, I have a backup, but I'd prefer to not lose my recordings. If I end up having to restore to a new A drive (or restoring to my existing A drive), will I lose the recordings that are on the B drive?

Oh yeah, and is this the part where I admit that I've been suffering from the stopples and they've been getting worse lately :eek:

Posted by: Robert S

I actually have that beat. My DOA drive would fail the Basic Quick test, but then passed the Advanced Test. It would then run perfectly for 10-20 hours before the stopples would start again and eventually the TiVo would reboot and stick at Welcome. If you ran the Advanced Test, it would fail, but if you ran the Basic test followed by the Advanced test, the drive would work again.

If you dd the failing drive on to a new one you should be able to save your recordings (assuming they're not corrupt already). If you do anything else you'll lose them. dd clones the drive, but you have to follow the 'marriage' rules. Once you boot the new drive you can't go back to the original.

Stoppling isn't something to be ashamed of - it's a sign of Impending Doom. If people changed their hard drive when the stoppling started, rather than waiting for their TiVo to become unbootable a lot less data would get lost.

Assuming it's not temperature related, stoppling is a good sign of a failing disk.

Posted by: dr_mal

Thanks :(

I guess I need to get the wife to approve a little shopping today.

Just so I don't really mess up, I can do the following, right?

- buy new 80gb drive for drive a
- dd old 40gb drive to new 80gb
- expand new 80gb drive so TiVo knows it's bigger than 40gb

Posted by: Robert S

Sounds good.

You'll be going over the 140Gb limit, so you'll want to make a note of the MFS Tools 2.0 fixes thread just incase your TiVo ever green screens.

Posted by: dr_mal

Right! Thanks for reminding me. On to the Hard Drive deals threads...

Posted by: dr_mal

OK, got a new 80 gb and restored my (old) backup onto it. TiVo boots no problem. It was definitely the drive. That's a relief.

I'm doing the dd command now. Is it advantageous to try to do the swap size fix while I've got the drives mounted now or should I wait until (if) I get a GSOD?

Posted by: Robert S

The only swap fix we've got documented is the emergency technique that takes over your inactive root partition. Obviously you need that partition for the next software upgrade, so you can't leave that in place permanently.

However, if you're feeling adventurous, you can try the permanent technique. Basically you've got to do the same thing as the rescue, but use pdisk to create a new 128Mb partition for your swap, rather than using the root partition. After that, the steps are as documented, swap the partition numbers and run mkswap.

Only then would you run mfsadd to fill up the drive.

If you'd like to try it and write it up, I'll add it to the fixes thread.

The advantage of this is that it's permanent, so you can relax about the possibility of a green screen, and you won't have to run the fix repeatedly if you green screen more than one.

But the difficulty of this hack is about the same as the rescue hack, so it's pretty expensive insurance, and if your TiVo repeatedly green screens it's probably time to buy it a new hard drive.

I would like to write it up as an annex to the 'rescue' thread as some people will prefer to put in the extra work at upgrade time to avoid the risk of green screen problems.

Posted by: dr_mal

I had wanted to keep my recordings, so I went and got a new 80gb drive.

Restored my old backup. TiVo booted fine.

dd'd the 'bad' drive to the new one. Waited. Waited. Waited. OK, a good copy. Marry it to the B drive. TiVo refuses to boot -- stuck at "Welcome Powering Up". I KNOW this drive is good :confused:

Restored the old backup (using -s 127 :) ) with the -x flag to expand/marry the new A and existing B drives. TiVo GSODs. Wait. TiVo reboots. TiVo hasn't made a succesfull call in 30 days, blah blah blah. Daily call. It's all good, but I've lost my recordings. No big deal, it was mostly reruns.

Conclusion: "Welcome Powering Up" may be a symptom of some bad data on the drive somewhere, not necessarily a bad drive. I'm going to try restoring my backup to my original A drive tonight and see if it'll boot again. If it does, I'll use that as a second drive in my SA TiVo.

Posted by: Robert S

'Welcome' is similar to the BIOS splash screen on a PC. If you stick there, it's the equivalent of Windows saying 'Non-system disk in drive A:' - it can't load the OS off the disk.

There have been cases of people doing a backup and restore to the same drive fixing this problem and similarly, restoring a known-good backup (if you can't get a viable backup of your drive) can fix it. Both these options erase your recordings, so what you did is your only chance of saving your recordings - you're hoping the drive is unable to allow the TiVo to boot, but that the data can be successfully copied to a good drive.

Add the complexities of a twin-drive setup, and it's perhaps not surprising that you lost the lot.

Posted by: dr_mal

Fortunately it happened in the middle of summer, so (pretty much) all I had were reruns of Law & Order and The Simpsons. If this had happened in the middle of a regular season, I'd be a little more upset :)

Now I'd like to figure out WHY this happened. If the drive is physically good (as PowerMax says), and I can read and write to it, what made it unable to boot? The last thing I remember doing was accessing TiVoWeb from the office. The ftp server is very flakey; working for a while and then not allowing any connections (and halting Internet Explorer) until the TiVo reboots.

edit: the ftp server was installed by the TurboNet script. I would assume it's the most recent and compiled for the correct processor. The version of TiVoWeb is 1.9.4b3

Posted by: dr_mal

Mystery solved. Posting results here in the hope someone else can benefit.

The hard drive is absolutely fine. Any stopples I had were due to the unit being too hot. Mid-to-high-50s is about average for my DirecTiVo, with 60s not out of the question. I need to cool it off, but that's a different story.

I mounted what I thought was the bad hard drive as a B drive on a standalone. That worked fine, until one day that machine got stuck at "welcome powering up" -- even with the "bad" b drive removed. I thought maybe that drive was just cursed, so I restored that machine's A drive from a backup. All was good again. Until it happened again. Without the "bad" drive hooked up.

It dawned on me that the last thing I did in all 3 situations was to modify my rc.sysinit and ftp it up to the TiVo. I was very careful with mounting root as read/write only long enough to put the new file up and then remounting it again read-only afterwards, but there was one thing I forgot/neglected to check:

After FTPing rc.sysinit back to the TiVo, chmod +x rc.sysinit!!!

I feel like such an idiot :o