TiVo Community Forums Archives - Sony Tivo Drive Upgrade Problem

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Sony Tivo Drive Upgrade Problem
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Posted by: lunawire

All - I finally got around to doing my turbonet and hard drive upgrade tonight.

The turbonet went fine. I can telnet in no problem.

I'm having problems with the hard drive upgrade. I followed the instructions and Tivo is stuck at the 'starting up' screen.

booting back up with Tiger's disc, the command:

mfstool info /dev/hda /dev/hdb

appears like everything is in order. It reports the 128h and all the partitions.

I don't think I've done something dumb with the hardware. How can I check the logs from Tiger's disc to see why it might be dying at bootup?

Thanks!

Posted by: Robert S

There aren't any logs on Tiger's disc that would help.

Tell us more about how you did the upgrade.

My immediate suspicion would be a jumper issue.

Posted by: lunawire

Hey Robert...

Thanks,

I'm pretty good with the jumpers. I did the upgrade with the 'A' drive on /dev/hdb and the 'B' drive on /dev/hdc. I did the upgrade with the mfstool application from Tiger's 2.0 boot CD. The drive was formatted as a FAT32 partition when added. Not sure if that means anything.

When I put it into the tivo, it would sit at the startup message, but if I returned the drives to the PC (even as /hdc and /hdd they) appeared ok in the MFS info.

So, this morning, this is what is happening. I put everything back and restarted again. It gets past the starting up message, and gives me the GSOD after telling me its 'almost there'. It will sit at this message for about 20 minutes before rebooting and then continuing to start up OK. If I reboot it (from Telnet or the remote control) it will go through this process again the next time. I've read a couple of messages that suggest I should just reboot it a bunch of times so it can work whatever the problem is, out.

I do have a turbonet and telnet access. If you have any ideas of what I can do to inspect the state of the machine that would be great. I should be able to see what is going on in the tivo logs, no?

Thanks!

Jason

Posted by: lunawire

Note - when up, Tivo reports 108h capacity which is the default 40gig drive plus a 80gig drive. Seems smaller than expected if this is any indication. Could I be having the swap file problem?

Posted by: Robert S

The TiVo logs are in /var/log although I don't know what you'd be looking for (might have to post suspicious looking log entries in the Underground).

One obvious thing to check would be the boot log in /var/log/kernel (does TiVo do dmesg?) and check that both drives are being detected correctly.

If it sticks at 'almost there' again, you can try forcing a green screen of death. At the telnet problem do 'mfsassert -please' and the TiVo should reboot and GSOD. The GSOD is quite a powerful repair utility.

Posted by: lunawire

I got some of the hacking tools installed (ls, tivoftpd, joe) so its now easier to see the log.

I don't see dmesg in the logs. I'd like to clear them and then force a reboot. Will there be any problems in deleting the log before doing this? I'll post the results once I have a clean log.

Thanks!

Jason