Instant Cake Warning

[Luckydawg]

I bought a weaknees updage kit, two new drives and thought I'd use Instant Cake in lieu of Hinsdale just because I'm not terribly conversant in Linux. I have what appears to be the "older Dell" problem (it's my only FAT32 machine) and involves the inability to boot as a master slave to a CD drive. I have tried everything under the sun (multiple jumper settings on CD and drives) and nothing works; when I can get Instant Cake to work (by setting thr CD drive as master) and it tells me the drives are ready to be installed, I sit at the grey powering up screen indefinitely. Putting the old drive back works, so at least the SO isn't too po'd.

My warning is this: I e-mailed PTVUpgade tech support almost a week ago and e-mailed the customer service center 48 hours later to advise them that I had not received a reply and to ask if they could help with my problem.

I have received no contact or help from this company. Not even a "sorry, we can't help you" reply. Their product may work great (I wouldn't know), but if you have problems, recognize that you are on your own.

[bidger]

The ability to boot from CD isn't determined by jumper settings, you set it as an option in the BIOS screen. If it's not there, you don't have that option.

I copied the following from Weaknees site on the TiVo Upgrade Kit page: "All Self-Install upgrade kits include a brand-new hard drive or two (fully prepped for your model)". I read "fully prepped" as "set the drive(s) into the TiVo and power it up". If I'm mistaken about that, Michael or anyone who knows, feel free to step in. If that's the case, why were you running "Instant Cake", a utility that can be used to restore a TiVo when you don't have an image of the TiVo kernel for that model, on "fully prepped" drives?

[Luckydawg]

CD setting was checked in (i) bios, (ii) connection to proper ide cable, and (iii) proper jumper setting (slave vs master). If I jumper and install the CD drive as the master, Intant Cake runs and purports to work -- unfortunately, the product it is turning out doesn't.

What I bought from weaknees was the bracket, fan, cable, etc. kit. The drives were local store-bought deals, not weeknees prepared drives. Sorry for the confusion. I have no problem with weaknees' products.

[bidger]

Do you have your C:\ drive and CD drive on the primary IDE channel with the C:\ jumpered as Master and CD drive as Slave? The two prospective TiVo drives should be on the secondary IDE channel jumpered as Master/Slave however you want to arrange them. If you didn't have that setup before rearrange it so you do and try running Instant Cake again.

[funtoupgrade]

I guess we can conclude then that you are either doing something wrong or there is a defect somewhere. If you want some help here then you need to give us lots of info. First, start by telling us how all the drives are hooked up to the computer when you can get it to boot into instantcake. Also the size of the new drives and how they were jumpered when you stuck them into the TiVo for testing.

[Luckydawg]

1) C: drive removed for safety (one, I don't want to risk the drive, two, I don't want an accidental boot to xp). Disconnecting the PC's primary drive is also recommended by PTU.
2) CD Drive on primary ide cable jumpered to slave
3) New 250gb seagate on secondary ide set as master; hooked to end;
4) New 160 gb Hitachi on secondary ide, set as slave, hooked to middle connection

There is another thread below where I kind of went through the problems. In the end, you cannot get instant cake to run unless the CD rom drive is the master (and jumpered accordingly). Even then, there is a read-only abort on the target drives which can only be rectified by setting them to cable select. With all of these changes from what PTU says you should do, its no wonder what I'm doing isn't working. I'm not angry and I'm not a genius -- I would've just liked the courtesy of a little help, like the kind you guys are graciously providing for free.

[bidger]

1) C: drive removed for safety (one, I don't want to risk the drive, two, I don't want an accidental boot to xp). Disconnecting the PC's primary drive is also recommended by PTU
My bad. I forgot you're not going to be making a backup with Instant Cake.

[Luckydawg]

My bad. I forgot you're not going to be making a backup with Instant Cake.

Yeah, I was just gonna put the drive in a box with a silica gel packet and leave it in case of an emergency.

Well, I've printed out Hinsdale and I'm gonna try it the long way.

[bidger]

I used the PTVUpgrade disk and Hinsdale's instruction to put a 160 GB in a TCD540040 and it went well. you should be fine.

[Luckydawg]

I used the PTVUpgrade disk and Hinsdale's instruction to put a 160 GB in a TCD540040 and it went well. you should be fine.


Hinsdale recommends checking your drive sizes right after the boot to Linux (Step 7, option 1). My new drive hdd is showing 137 Mb. Is it too early to be concerned with the updated (lba48?) kernel support, or should I do something now to show the full 250 mb?

Thnks

[funtoupgrade]

What kind of computer are you using for this backup/restore? My Pentium 4 recognizes the full capacity of anything I have thrown at it so have not encountered the 137MB BIOS limit which I understand happens on older systems. Is there any chance there is a later BIOS upgrade for your computer that might help out here?

[Luckydawg]

What kind of computer are you using for this backup/restore? My Pentium 4 recognizes the full capacity of anything I have thrown at it so have not encountered the 137MB BIOS limit wihich I understand happens on older systems. Is there any chance there is a later BIOS upgrade for your computer that might help out here?


I'll take a look. It's an old dino -- a PII 400 Dell XPS-R400. Problem is, its not only my only FAT32 machine, its my only IDE machine. I see Hinsdale says you later have to expand the drive, so I guess I'm over that hurdle -- the problem is that when I used mfsrestore to restore the backup image to one of my new drives for testing, I got the grey screen of death again (please wait, powering up). So even following Hinsdale, something is going wrong..... This is the kind of grief I had hoped instant cake would help me avoid. I probably over-complicated the isssue by trying to go from 1 drive to two new ones at the same time. :(

[bidger]

I can't remember the particulars, but I do recall when I bought and downloaded Instant Cake for an HDR-112 there was mention made about the machine you'd be using for the upgrade. I didn't pay much mind to it because I've done 7 upgrades on the Intel CA-810 mobo Celeron 500MHz CPU. Instant Cake worked for me, btw.

funtoupgrade's recommendation about seeing if there is an upgrade to the BIOS might be worth pursuing. If you don't know of anyone who could loan you a more recent machine, you might consider visiting a computer part store, not a Staples or OfficeMax, but one that actually has techs working on PCs and explain your plight and see if they have a machine they think might work and take either your Instant Cake or Boot CD and instructions, the drives and TiVo. If they're not comfortable letting you connect the drives, allow them to, but tell them you want to execute the upgrade. Check your capacity before running any commands and if it's not right, that's when you run Gunlock or some other utility to correct that situation.

If this all seems too daunting, then you might want to consider the pre-formatted drives because it seems as it stands the PC you're trying to run the upgrades on isn't suited for it.

[Dan Collins]

The basic problem here is that, apparently, the PC being used will ONLY boot from CD if the CD drive is configured as primary MASTER. The Instant Cake process is hard coded with the assumption that the Instant Cake CD in on hdb (primary SLAVE), and the target TiVo drives are hdc and hdd (secondary master, and slave if applicable).

You can use the Hinsdale instructions. When it tells you to restore the backup image, just use the one on the Instant Cake CD (found in the _IMAGES subdirectory, filename 000001).

[bidger]

That's good to know as a workaround, Dan.

So, have you done anything with your upgrade so far today, Jay?

[Luckydawg]

Dan - Thanks. I *think* I understood your post. Bidger, to answer your question, I treid everything new today according to hisdale and used the floppy approach for mfstools.

I also got weaknees cd to boot, but it would hang.

I formatted an old 6gb drive to house to tivo image (protects my c: xp drive) and successfully backed up the image off my Tivo dirve. When I used mfsrestore (per hisdale) to put the image on my new 250gb Hitachi and tested it in my Tivo, I was again stuck at the grey powering up screen. I did it again with a brand new seagate 160mb drive, and it got past the powering up screen only to go to the green screen saying "there is a serious error with your Tivo, do not turn off for three hours, etc. "

I'm ready to buy a new tivo.

[mjitkop]

it got past the powering up screen only to go to the green screen saying "there is a serious error with your Tivo, do not turn off for three hours, etc. "

I got the same thing when I replaced my original 40GB hard drive with a larger one. I did exactly what my DVR told me and just waited about 3 hours. It came to life by itself after that. :) It's well worth the wait when you see your new recording capacity! :up:

[bidger]

Just so you won't feel so alone, I pulled out a S1 TiVo with Lifetime that I previously upgraded with a 120G then put into storage. I was trying to use Instant Cake to restore an image to the original drive to store as a backup, but IC reported it as too small. No surprise that when I disconnected the 120G and put the 14G, it went into a reboot loop. That didn't faze me, but when I reconnected the 120G and powered up, the 120G wouldn't even go into a reboot loop. I got nothing from it! I thought that was really odd because it was working fine the last time it was powered up. I took it out and ran IC, but I when I plugged it in, again nothing. Tried again, nothing. Then I looked at the jumper and thought that it didn't look right, not as far placement. It didn't seem to be seated right. I took it out, but dropped it on the carpet and had to fish around to find it. When I finally did and put it back in, I had an "Almost there..." screen. Next thing I know it's starting Guided Setup. So it goes to show that any little thing that's not right can throw the whole thing off.

I hope it comes out of the GSoD, Jay, but even if it doesn't don't let that deter you. You're bound to have something go wrong on your first upgrade attempt.

[Luckydawg]

You can use the Hinsdale instructions. When it tells you to restore the backup image, just use the one on the Instant Cake CD (found in the _IMAGES subdirectory, filename 000001).


Dan - I tried re-restoring the image off my backup drive to the new drive. It booted in the Tivo once (got to the "almost there" screen) and then rebooted to the GSOD again.

Can you give the the exact syntax of the command I should use to get the image off the Instant cake CD? I'm not conversant enough in Linux to know how to restore a file from a removable device subdirectory.

Assume: hda - CDROM
hdb - null
hdc - new drive (as master); format to remove traces of prior efforts.
hdd - null

I can also boot to mfstools floppy and access the CDrom drive without booting to it, correct? If that's the case, then you can pretty much redo the drive assignments above any way you think is correct.

Once I get the single replacement drive working, I plan on adding a second drive for additional capacity. I tried to do it all at once, but it got too complicated with the CDrom slave limitation.

I want to keep my original Tivo drive as a safety net.

Thanks!

[Dan Collins]

You can boot any way you please...using a floppy or any standard free TiVoTools boot CD. once booted, Linux is running from a RAM drive, so you can swap out the boot CD for the Instant Cake CD.

Assuming you have booted one way or another, and drives are arranged as shown....

First you have to mount the CD so you can read from it:

mount /dev/hda /cdrom

Then restore the IC image to your new drive:

mfsrestore -s 127 -xzpi /cdrom/_IMAGES/000001 /dev/hdc

That should do it. The only possible problem will be the way the _IMAGES directory shows up under Linux (I don't have a Linux machine handy to check it). If the above command fails, then try:

mfsrestore -s 127 -xzpi /cdrom/.images/000001 /dev/hdc

The first form is the way the CD is written, the second is the way it looks after booting from the IC CD. One or the other should work.

[Luckydawg]

Dan - You are the man. Everything worked like a charm. Put the new drive in (I'll worry about adding the second drive later) and it booted just fine. Only problem is that the software version is all the way back to 4.02 or so, I can't get live tv (Tivo says to try changing channels, make sure cable box is plugged in (duh), all of which did not work) and I cannot get my wireless adapter to connect to my wireless router, so I cant get the new software download and I can't get any channel information.

By now, it is clear to me that I really should have paid someone to do this. Linux is just an entirely different universe from the one I'm used to -- and I'm not DOS/Windows n00b either!

For now, I've put the old drive back in because I'm in deep doo-doo if Deperate Housewives is not recorded for the viewing pleasure of my SO.

[tivoupgrade]

My warning is this: I e-mailed PTVUpgade tech support almost a week ago and e-mailed the customer service center 48 hours later to advise them that I had not received a reply and to ask if they could help with my problem.

I have received no contact or help from this company. Not even a "sorry, we can't help you" reply. Their product may work great (I wouldn't know), but if you have problems, recognize that you are on your own.


Luckydawg,

Sorry you've had problems with InstantCake, and your Dell. You might want to check your spam folders, because if you did send anything to our helpdesk, you should have gotten an autoresponse forwarding you to our forums (http://forum.ptvupgrade.com) for help with DIY products such as InstantCake. PC compatibility issues are discussed there, as well as other issues folks have.

We've always been clear and up front about the fact that we do not provide direct responses for assistant with DIY products (although we do tend to respond to lots of inquiries on our forums) and this is documented on our contact form as well as in the autoresponse).

As for your specific problem, I've seen some posts on our forums along the lines of this specific issue with certain DELL systems. In order to make InstantCake as easy to use as possible and for as many people as possible, we've established the requirement that the CDROM be set and booted from as the SECONDARY SLAVE. It is unfortunate that some computers will not work in this mode (I personally consider that to be a shortcoming of those specific PCs) and with that noted, we are considering an 'advanced' mode of the next release of InstantCake which will allow users to specify the location of the CDROM device (flexibility == complexity in many cases, so we'll have to figure out how to make it as easy for as many people as possible).

And with all that said, I'd encourage you to use our forums (http://forum.ptvupgrade.com) if you have not fully resolved your issue, as there are a few threads where this is mentioned, along with workarounds.

Thanks,
Lou Jacob
PTVupgrade

[Luckydawg]

Tivoupgrade - If you think your site is clear enough on how alone DIY'ers are - then fine. I'm telling you that when you promise a idiot proof "instant" result, then the software should deliver -- not fall back on excuses like "it must be your PC". Just my opinion. At the end of the day, your product may work well; I have no idea.

Now I've gone and put my old drive back in for temporary measures and it is now corrupted. Error 32 when trying to select a progam to record; error 86 when trying to edit or confirm a season pass. In short, the old drive won't record now either.

:mad:

[Dan Collins]

...Only problem is that the software version is all the way back to 4.02 or so, I can't get live tv (Tivo says to try changing channels, make sure cable box is plugged in (duh), all of which did not work) and I cannot get my wireless adapter to connect to my wireless router, so I cant get the new software download and I can't get any channel information...Yeah, I had a similar problem with a TCD140xxx I rebuilt for a friend. You need to do a "Clear and Delete Everything" and then reboot, and hook it up to phone line to get 7.2 downloaded.

[Luckydawg]

Yeah, I had a similar problem with a TCD140xxx I rebuilt for a friend. You need to do a "Clear and Delete Everything" and then reboot, and hook it up to phone line to get 7.2 downloaded.


Buwahahahahaha (Dr. Evil). I got the wireless working again. I had a good signal strength connection, whcih told me my settings were correct, but connections and connection tests would fail. So I reset up my network on the Tivo, confirmed WEP, etc.; powered down Tivo; powered down entire house network; powered up entire house network; re-powered up Tivo and voila! Its now in the process of an update and I'll blip onto the Tivo.com website to request a push of the latest firmware.

Thanks for all your help, Dan. :up:

[Luckydawg]

*sigh*

Infinitely stuck on "preparing" to download program info (new drive).
Goes through info setup and contacts Tivo just fine, sets up the remote for my cable box and then just hangs after the zip code entry. Have tried this 3 times.

In light of the above, I thought I'd reset the original drive given its #32 and #86 error codes; so I did a clear & delete when I went to bed last night it said "erasing drive, etc. - this may take up to an hour". Well. six hours later, it was still on that screen with the red hard drive access light blinking on and off perhaps once every 2 seconds. Power down & Repower - same problem. Even Tivo can't clear and delete the drive.

Now I've got
(a) a f'd up original Tivo drive; and
(b) a f'd up replacement drive.

I also have a Hinsdale image of my old Tivo, but who knows if its any good and I'm not sure what commands I'd use to try to restore it anyway.

[ISWIZ]

I replaced a crashed drive over the weekend with Instant Cake and it works fine. Only problem I have now is only one tuner is working. It says the other is not enabled.

[Luckydawg]

I'm gonna have my IT guys whack an old box that we've got laying around (PIII, 750 Mhz) and reformat the drive back to FAT32 for me. I'll give that a try. It may just be that the PC I'm using is just too darn old.

I did manage to get instant cake working this morning by putting an old 6 gig drive on the primary channel as master (with a dos load ONLY) and the CD rom as a primary slave. I even got out an old CDrom read-only drive in lieu of the CDRW I'd been using, hoping that a different CD drive would help. Well, it "baked the cake", but I ended up with the same problem. After I reconfigured my network and ran through setup, the new drive hangs on the first item after the zip code entry while its tries to download the prgram data. Its just stuck on "preparing" or "configuring"; I can't remember which.

I also got an error message that a hardware error had occurred which required my attention before Tivo would work, but it did not specify what the hardware error was or how to fix it.

I may as well have opted to do brain surgery on myself for all the luck I'm having. :o

[Luckydawg]

OK; it's finally working!!! :) I ended up using the instant cake image, but this did not carry over the account number to the drive (it said "not found 00000000000") in the settings. I kept getting a "you have a harware problem which must be fixed before you you record or watch anything" error. On the "what's playing" option, I finally found a reference to error code 51. A little research here told me to do a complete clear & delete and then sure enough, Tivo came right back up (with the account number). It took about 20 minutes to go through guided setup and its finally working!!! Went from 41 hours to 155 hours (consistent with 40gb to 160 gb).

Now I need to to a little blesstivo research to add my second drive. Its only 120mb (the 250mb Hitachi crapped out), so I'm hoping it'll be easy to add.

Thanks for all your help.


Edit: And I will say this for instant cake - when I manage to screw up my original Tivo drive, it was nice to have a clean restorable image on a CD rom to fall back on.

[Yog-Sothoth]

A little research here told me to do a complete clear & delete

I'm not sure about the InstantCake ISO you used, but the one I have states that a "Clear and Delete Everything" is needed after completion; it states this during the installation.

In my case, this is not needed, as I boot first from a PTVNet CD and insert the InstantCake CD when it asks.

[Luckydawg]

I'm not sure about the InstantCake ISO you used, but the one I have states that a "Clear and Delete Everything" is needed after completion; it states this during the installation.

In my case, this is not needed, as I boot first from a PTVNet CD and insert the InstantCake CD when it asks.

I downloaded the ISO a few days ago. I pulled the image off manually as outlined above, and if the PTV instructions said to do a clear and restore, then its my fault for not reading them at the time because I had given up on the instant cake software itself by then. I never had the PTVNet cd as myt system doesn't need it and isn't supported by it.

Anyways, all is well. My 160 gb A drive is happily humming away and this evening I pulled it out and used mfsadd to marry it to a new 120gb B drive. With 82 hours best and 296 hours lowest quality, I should be ok for a while. :)

[Dan Collins]

Glad you finally got your TiVo back, Jay.

[bidger]

Yeah, way to power through.

[Yog-Sothoth]

if the PTV instructions said to do a clear and restore, then its my fault for not reading them at the time because I had given up on the instant cake software itself by then

It took me three attempts before I actually did the process correctly. I tried first InstantCake and then PTVNet: hardware error; second tried InstantCake and "Clear and Delete Everything": got tired of waiting and decided to read the PTVNet forums; at last inserted PTVNet CD first, then inserted InstantCake. The instructions are on the PTVNet disk; I just didn't bother to read everything while installing (the first and second times). :o

[Luckydawg]

Glad you finally got your TiVo back, Jay.


Thanks Dan, and you too, Bidger, for all of your help! I could not have done it without you guys (or a 3 month course in Linux :D ).

[Luckydawg]

I'd like to correct the record above. In my recent travails with a bad secondary drive in my Tivo, I ended up having to re-image my system and start from scratch. To avoid the headaches above, I borrowed a FAT 32 box from a friend that didn't have a problem with a CDROM as a primary slave.

Ptvupgrade's product worked as advertised and my earlier problems above must have been a function of the PC I was using at that time. The re-image worked perfectly once I had a machine capable of hooking the drives up as required by the software.

My apologies to PTV.

[larock]

I struggled with trying to get my CD booting from Primary Slave with the HD on Secondary Master. The system did not recognize the CD drive (Unknown drive). Many cable swaps and gyrations later, I ended up with a CD drive both on Primary Master and Primary Slave. However, I have the Primary Master configured as OFF. Recognized the Primary Slave just fine. For future reference.