InstantCake Upgrade Issue

[Malibyte]

Hi all -

I recently upgraded my 80GB series 2 TiVo to 200GB after much trial and tribulation (PTV's lba48 kernel could not see the whole drive, so I wound up copying everything to another CD, booting up under Knoppix, which DID find the whole drive, then doing the upgrade with the InstantCake image using the same command syntax as the PTVbake script.)

Anyway, the TiVo booted up just fine with the bigger drive, and I did a "Clear and Delete Everything" followed by the whole Guided Setup.

It then tried to organize downloaded program data. It got to the "Loading data...." stage, got up to about 8%, then rebooted.

As I had told it to use the USB network interface instead of the phone, I had it do a connect and download again. Same thing happened.

I went ahead and ran it through a "Kickstart" as this had worked before using the original hard drive when it had a similar problem. No difference; same thing happened after the green screen, reboot, reconnect/download.

So....I thought it might be a swap-partition problem, as so many of these things seem to be. I pulled the drive and booted up with PTV's Universal Boot "lba48" CD (the $20 one), and took a look at the kernel log on /dev/hdc9.

The swap partition IS BEING USED: the 1300xx KB swap area IS DEFINITELY ADDED.

However, I did find a few of these in the logs:

TmkFatalError: Threadmfsassert <101>: assertion failure
TmkFatalError: TmkClipCache1 <206>: assertion failure

Each one of these was followed by an immediate reboot.

After the reboot, it had to do a filesystem check on the /var partition, as there were some inode problems:

Inode 2057, i_blocks wrong 30, counted 18
Set i_blocks to counted? yes

I saw a few of these also, in between reboots:

Starting EventSwitcher
Filesystem is inconsistent - cannot mount!
(it was reconstructed)
You must manually restart the Event Switcher
(reboot).


Now, the InstantCake image contains a really old software version (5.4); they're up to 7.2-something now. Could this have anything to do with it?

I also tried simply backing up the original 80GB drive (which was current as of yesterday, with the latest software update) and then doing a restore and expand (using the exact same procedure as I had with the fully SUCCESSFUL upgrade of my Humax from 80 to 300GB). It would get through the "Almost there" screen, then drop to a black screen, eventually getting to TiVo Central, but it was quite unstable. I pulled the drive then, also, and found that the swap area was also being added then, also. BUT....the kernel on the TiVo drive was only seeing 137GB instead of 200. Right now, the drive with the InstantCake image described in the first part of this post is in the box. Everything else that can work without the program listings does, but I'd like to get this working. Anyone out there seen this before?

Thanks for any help!

Bob

[Malibyte]

Addendum:

I let the TiVo sit and stew for about 4-5 hours, then tried the "Connect to TiVO service" again.

This time it got to "99% - 1 Min" before rebooting again.

Did a clean reboot, then tried it again. This time it finished. Afterward, it said that the download succeeded, pending a restart. So, I rebooted it cleanly again. It came up and did the OS upgrade - and actually finished it. It's now at 7.2.1.

It still hasn't updated the program listings. I'll go ahead and connect again after "24". Wish me luck.

Bob

[Malibyte]

Tried to connect to TiVo to update the program listings. The first time, it downloaded the info and was able to get about 20% of it loaded before it abruptly rebooted. When it came up again, it didn't get past the "Welcome! Powering up...." screen until I pulled the plug, then fired it up again. When it booted, it told me that it had 3 days of program info. Connected again; it made it to 35% this time.

I'm wondering if this is a software problem or whether it's a problem with the Maxtor 200GB hard drive (almost brand new...about a month old). Anyone else see anything like this???

Bob

[Malibyte]

Woke up this morning, found that it still hasn't been able to load the full program database. I'm thinking about getting another (different mfr) 200GB HDD and cloning the current drive (dd if=/dev/hdc of=/dev/hdd). If anyone thinks this ISN'T a hardware problem, please let me know before I spend another $90 on a new drive. Thanks!!

[Dan Collins]

I'm not all that familiar with the InstantCake procedure (I've only used it to obtain an image which I installed by hand), but check to make sure that the swap was correctly initialized. mfsrestore will create a large swap, but doesn't initialize it correctly if it is over 127MB. You need to use another utility, like tpip, to get the swap setup correctly.

The symptoms are very likely a swap problem - whether that is a swap initialization problem or bad disk sectors in the swap space is hard to say. Do you have telnet access to the unit? If so, you can check how much swap the TiVo thinks it has with meminfo.

[Malibyte]

I'm not all that familiar with the InstantCake procedure (I've only used it to obtain an image which I installed by hand), but check to make sure that the swap was correctly initialized. mfsrestore will create a large swap, but doesn't initialize it correctly if it is over 127MB. You need to use another utility, like tpip, to get the swap setup correctly.

Hi Dan - thanks for the reply...I also had to install the InstantCake image by hand. I did pull the hard drive and take a look at the /var/log/kernel file yesterday. The swap file IS being initialized and added. I did use tpip (tpip -s -1 /dev/hdc) after restoring the image, but wanted to make sure. I had forgotten to do this when I upgraded my Humax, and it wouldn't boot at all most of the time, or if it did, would crash and reboot quickly thereafter. After initializing the swap, all was copacetic. So, I definitely did remember to initialize the swap this time around.

The symptoms are very likely a swap problem - whether that is a swap initialization problem or bad disk sectors in the swap space is hard to say. Do you have telnet access to the unit? If so, you can check how much swap the TiVo thinks it has with meminfo.

I'm thinking it's possibly the hard drive. If the swap weren't being added, I don't think it would have gotten through an entire OS upgrade and been otherwise stable (other than when trying to load the program data).

Telnet - I've been trying to telnet in, but it's not letting me in on port 23. Which port do you use?? I'd love to be able to look at this real-time (e.g. tail -f /var/log/kernel) but I can't find a way in.

Thanks....Bob

[JamieP]

From your error messages, it looks like MFS is corrupt. I'd pull the disk, run a manufacturers diagnostic on it, then reimage and upgrade to see if there error happens again.

The newer tivos (since 5.x, I believe) shipped with 256MB root partitions. Unfortunately, when you restore with mfsrestore, it always makes the alternate root 128MB. So If you restored a 5.4 instantcake image, then took the 7.x upgrade, you probably have a 128MB root, while tivo intended you to have 256MBs. It's possible that a 7.x elmo root needs more than 128MB, though I doubt it. You could pull your drive and mount the root partition to see how full it is.

[captain_video]

Are you sure you have the correct InstantCake version for your Tivo? You never mentioned what kind of Tivo you have. I believe version 5.4 was only for the DVD/Tivo hybrid models, IIRC. The standalone models went from 4.0x to 7.2 and the DTivo models went from 3.1.1x to 6.2 so I'm wondering how yours managed to upgrade from 5.4 to 7.x, unless the DVD models have also migrated to some version of 7.x. I haven't followed much with regards to the DVD models so I may be way off base here.

[Malibyte]

From your error messages, it looks like MFS is corrupt. I'd pull the disk, run a manufacturers diagnostic on it, then reimage and upgrade to see if there error happens again.

Jamie - you're correct, it was MFS.

I pulled the drive and hooked it up to one of my Linux boxes, wiped the partition table, created one big extended/logical partition on it (and had it check the partition for bad blocks), just to rule out any really significant (e.g. mechanical) issues with the hard drive. No problem there. So, I then re-restored the TiVo image and partitions. No difference, same thing happened (random reboots during data loading).

I remember having had a similar problem after upgrading my Humax to 300GB (it would bomb out with "error S03" (though not reboot)) which I fixed by doing a kickstart (#-57). That had not solved the problem here. I found a Wikipedia article on TiVo diagnostics (from a post on this forum explaining the S03 error). I found out that there's another kickstart - #-58 - which actually cleans up the MFS partitions. After doing that - it worked!!! Loaded the program data without any problems.

Are you sure you have the correct InstantCake version for your Tivo? You never mentioned what kind of Tivo you have. I believe version 5.4 was only for the DVD/Tivo hybrid models, IIRC. The standalone models went from 4.0x to 7.2

It's the TCD540080 Series2 standalone, and I definitely downloaded the proper .iso for that box (trust me, I double and triple-checked before downloading it). It's version 5.4.

Thanks for the help - much appreciated!