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Sat-T60 w/ dual 160GB drives- I'm bit by the GSOD problem. Help!
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Posted by: seanmcgpa

Came home to an endlessly rebooting Sat-T60 which I had upgraded in August with dual Maxtor 160GB (~137GB) drives.

After lurking around, I am pretty sure I have been bit by the swap file problem. Some file system error has probably occurred, and now the built in Tivo repair utility can't run.

My first thought was to just format the two drives, restore my backup image and start over. But really I'd rather keep my recordings ... I have lots of archived stuff I want to keep.

I'm not a newbie, but for the life of me the Robert S's (who I really appreciate, don't get me wrong) instructions are daunting to say the least.

Specifically, the section D, renumbering the partitions. With "pdisk /dev/hda", are r 8 4 and r 5 9 command line arguments? Entered at some prompt?

And in section F, restoring the original partition numbers, do I reverse my steps exactly?

Any hints and cheers of good luck appreciated ....

THANKS!

Posted by: stormsweeper

the r 8 4 command is relabel, entered at the pdisk prompt. pdisk is fairly easy to use, just hit ? to get the commands.

Two questions first, though:

1) Did you use DTiVoMad or MFS Tools 2 to upgrade

2) Did you choose to increase your swap space at that time (-s switch to mfsrestore, or answer yes to "will target system be > 140 GB?")?

Posted by: seanmcgpa

quote:
Originally posted by stormsweeper
the r 8 4 command is relabel, entered at the pdisk prompt. pdisk is fairly easy to use, just hit ? to get the commands.

Two questions first, though:

1) Did you use DTiVoMad or MFS Tools 2 to upgrade

2) Did you choose to increase your swap space at that time (-s switch to mfsrestore, or answer yes to "will target system be > 140 GB?")?

I don't believe I added more swap space ... When I upgraded I believe it was before the 127 swap option was widely known. So I probably have 64 megs of swap although I'm not 100% certain.

I gather I'm not going to be able to do this successfully. I'll have to reinstall my backup image and lose my recordings.

Should I reformat the drives FIRST? And can I reformat them under Windows XP?

Thanks for any info

Posted by: stormsweeper

No, you should be able to do a manual recovery.

Boot up with the kazymyr boot CD, type pdisk /dev/hdX, then follow the prompts to switch out your 8th and 9th partitions. run "mkswap -v1 /dev/hdX8" (you should get a message saying it was truncated to some number) the pack it up and put it back in your tivo.

Posted by: seanmcgpa

quote:
Originally posted by stormsweeper
No, you should be able to do a manual recovery.

Boot up with the kazymyr boot CD, type pdisk /dev/hdX, then follow the prompts to switch out your 8th and 9th partitions. run "mkswap -v1 /dev/hdX8" (you should get a message saying it was truncated to some number) the pack it up and put it back in your tivo.

Thanks for the quick reply.

This will allow me to boot through the built in repair utility but I'll still have the problem of having not enough swap space? If another GSOD occurs I'll have to keep doing this?

Posted by: stormsweeper

No, that will switch the partitions used for your /var partition (normally 128) and your swap (normally 64). You'll end up with a 64MB var partition, and ~127 of swap (the limit for a single swap partition). You can leave it like this, or switch them back after the GSOD has resolved itself.