Reboot & Power Supply (SAT-60)

[spiffy]

Hi everyone,

My SAT-60 is stuck in rebooting hell again, after I replaced the HD only a few months ago. I thought maybe it was the hard drive again -- so I went through the trouble of ordering another HD, and did the whole dd_rescue thing -- only to discovered that the drive copied perfectly, and there was no error whatsoever. :(

I read in several posts and on weeknees.com, that another possible reason for rebooting cycles is the power supply. Is there any way for certain? I don't have it in me to replace the power supply myself, so I will have to send it out -- but I don't want to spend another $150 if only to realize that the original power supply is fine...

Any ideas how I should go about at this point? I've always kept the DTivo well-ventilated, and the inside is completely clean; so I don't see any other culprit except the power supply (even though it's always plugged into a high-end surge protector.) But I'd really like to know for sure before I take the plunge...

Any suggestions and/or recommendations will be greatly appreciated. Thanks in advance!

Spiffy

[spiffy]

Anyone?

[brieweb]

If it's rebooting, it sounds like a kernel thing. I have been wondering if it's possible to attach a serial console and watch the boot output. Then you could see what is happening. I just compiled a box with an updated Debian kernel that mount the partitions. Maybe you have a permissions problem on init or something? Maybe the root partition got switched and now it can't boot. You could try using tpip from Todd Miller's Tivo toys. How about if you switch the root partion?

[spiffy]

It's not doing the rebooting in the middle of a show like a lot of people have been discussing; it's doing that classic "Welcome, Powering Up..." rebooting cycles.

I emailed Weaknees about it, and even they don't think it's a power supply issue, and suggested that I run the DOS disk tools. I'm going to try that this weekend; and worse comes to worst, I guess I can wipe the HD clean and re-InstantCake it and see if that'll do anything.

The interesting thing was, when I (or actually, my friend who understands Linux) was doing the dd_rescue procedure, we were not able to actually access the content of the drive -- we could see it, but we couldn't mount it or access it. I don't know if that was supposed to be normal or not. If one is supposed to be able to see the content of the drive while it's connected to a Linux box, then I guess there is a problem with the HD...

[spike2k5]

download a boot cd from mfslive.org

run

mfsinfo /dev/hdc > mymfsinfo.txt

pdisk -l /dev/hdc > mypart.txt

(where /dev/hdc is your tivo drive setup as secondary master)

send me those two files or content and I can take a look.

[scs_x5]

Hi everyone,

My SAT-60 is stuck in rebooting hell again....
Spiffy

Did you ever resolve your problem, I am having the same issue.

Thanks.

[Cedric]

After a couple of weeks of working on the same problem, (constant rebooting, never getting past "Powering Up"), it turns out my problem was a dead or dying drive.

My HDVR2 was expanded by adding a 250 gb B drive to the original 40 gb A drive. The A drive didn't seem to be spinning up and thus the Tivo would never start.

I bought a new power supply and installed it, but it made no difference. ( I don't mind having an extra PS for my 2 other S2 Dtivos, tho).

I ended up using the 250 gb drive and restoring an image to make a single drive upgrade and that solved the problem.

Note to me: as much as I wanted it was the power supply, it was the drive. This is the second time that one of a two drive upgrade that has died. Now that large capacity drives are more common, I'll only do single drive upgrades from here on out.

[spiffy]

Turned out mine was a HD problem too -- although I think it was software corruption, not hardware failure.

I InstantCaked a new HD, swapped it out, and everything started working again -- I lost all my recordings though. :(

But something strange happened this morning -- I lost my blue background when accessing the menu. Now whenever there should be a blue background, it's transparent -- and if I was in the middle of playing a show or even Live TV, the show will just keep playing, while the Now Playing List or To Do List is displayed on screen.

It's a bit annoying -- but I mainly worry that if this means I'm going to have software corruption again? :confused:

spiffy