TiVo Community Forums Archives - AT&Tivo upgrade problem

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AT&Tivo upgrade problem - video freezes
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Posted by: ChiRusty79

Hey! So I decided to upgrade my AT&Tivo, but ran into a big problem. My video freezes up and I have to reboot to "fix" the problem. But rebooting sometimes goes into a rebooting cycle, or the unit will just freeze again...

Here's what I did... I used the CD image for BlessTivo, booted from the CD and set the new 80GB B drive as primary slave. I forgot if I used byteswapping or not, does it make a difference?? Regardless, I did the default (hit enter) boot. So it blessed, said 74GB, so all was good. Installed it into Tivo. I used an IDE/66 cable or whatever, it had 80 conductors and 40 connectors whatever that means but it was 3x more expensive than the regular cable, but figured if I didn't get that one, something would inevitably go wrong. Well there went that idea, lol. So I left the A as cable select and set B as slave and hooked up the cable as the diagram on the package said to. Powered up and all seemed good. It said I had 141 hrs of recording time (opposed to 40). Cool! But when I went to watch a recorded show, about 15 mins into it, the video froze. Then it would play for about a second after 1 minute or so, and then pause a minute or so again, etc. etc. I pulled the plug and rebooted. Watched the show jsut fine. Then I tried to watch another show, and 10 mins or so into it, the same problem. So I eventually rebooted and decided to try live tv. This would lock up completely and not "unfreeze" for that second or so. Upon rebooting then, the unit would enter a rebooting cycle. It'd go to the main screen and reboot, or try to go to the main screen/animation and skip a lot and reboot on its own.

So does the cable select jumper setting have anything to do with this?
Do I need to "unbyteswap" the B drive somehow?
Do I need to do a reset of some kind?
Maybe something else will fix this?

Thanks!

Posted by: Robert S

I think your B drive is faulty.

If you had got the byteswapping wrong your capacity would not have gone up.

The cable is fine. TiVo can't actually take advantage of the more expensive cable, but people seem to like to pamper their TiVoes by bying 80-way cables.

Your jumpers are fine, the TiVo wouldn't have booted otherwise.

This is why I tell people to replace their A drive rather than adding a B drive! You've now got to figure out /which/ drive is faulty and now the good drive is married to the bad one.

Take a compressed backup NOW. If anything else goes wrong you could lose the TiVo!

Go to your drive manufacturers' website and download their diagnostic tools. Run them on both drives, although it's very likely the new drive that's causing the problem.

If you're lucky, you may be able to save the recordings that were on the A drive before the upgrade by restoring your compressed backup over it.

Alternatively if you get a replacement for the failing drive (under some circumstances you can get a warranty replacement drive delivered before you have to return the faulty one) you can use dd to clone the failing drive on to its replacement, which /should/ save everything on the TiVo. You'll need to use the variation Hinsdale suggests 'if [the normal one] returns errors'.

Posted by: ChiRusty79

How do I do a compressed backup? Is that part of the MFS Tools? What do I back up to? I don't have any extra drives and what drives I do have are NTFS.

If I take out the B drive, Tivo will not work, correct? So basically I have to "fix" this drive somehow with the manufacturer's software?

Posted by: Robert S

The mfrs software will help you to figure out which drive is failing and to convince the mfr or vendor that it is faulty. It won't help you repair it.

The A drive will not work without the B drive. The rather quaint term 'married' is used to describe the condition of your drives. MFS Tools can 'divorce' them and dd can transfer the 'marriage' on to another drive.

What worries me is that if the B drive fails you will have great difficulty recovering the TiVo - I don't know of anywhere you can download a backup and MFS Tools needs to access both drives of a married pair.

You will need access to a FAT partition to make a backup. If you do an advance replacement of the failing drive as I suggested you could put a FAT partition on the replacement drive to make your backup.

It's not obvious how long your failing drive has to live. MFS Tools doesn't need to read very much off the B drive to make a compressed backup, so as long as it still spins up you should be OK. Let me emphasize, though, if either of the drives fails before you get a backup you will have real problems fixing it yourself - your only option in that case will probably be to buy a replacement A drive from weaknees or 9th Tee.

Read Hindale's post at the top of this Forum to learn about MFS Tools.

Posted by: ChiRusty79

So two days ago, I tried to backup the drives, but with no luck. My main drive in my computer is NTFS and when I tried to attach the 2 drives, a separate FAT drive and the CDROM, my computer wouldnt boot. It may be some Gateway "perk" that the drive sent with it has to be hooked up or something... I couldn't even boot to the floppy either. Well anyways, I couldn't get anything to work w/o the factory drive as primary-masterSo I gave up and just installed the drives back in TiVo, but set the master to master jumper and the B: as slave, put them in the correct spots on the cable and fired the unit back up. All worked initally, and has been working fine for two days now. So I guess it was just the cable select on the master that caused the problem, or maybe just the alignment of the planets, who knows. Anyways, everything works great now, but unfortunately I still don't have a backup of anything. Regardless I'm enjoying 141 hours of Tivo now!!

Posted by: weaknees

Well, glad to hear that things are working again, but you should really make a backup (or make sure you have a friend with the same unit) because that doesn't sound very stable.

Does your PCs BIOS check for CDs and floppies to use as boot disks? You may need to change something there.

Michael

Posted by: ChiRusty79

Yes, I can boot to a floppy or CD if the original HD is pri-master. If it's not, it wont recognize the secondary channel or the floppy. I just get the bios startup screen with the processor/memory check and it stops there. I wish i hadn't tossed my old computer, figures after not using it for a year, and throw it out, I could use it a month later. I'll have to try and find a PC to stick my A+B drives into and back them up soon. If I do the backup of the married drives, does that image (or whatever it's called) can you just restore onto the original A and revert it back to a single drive unit?