Series 1 with 160 Gb stuck in reboot loop

[RickStrobel]

My dad's TiVo Series 1 started acting up lately. It was freezing and doing other weird things before he let me know the other day that it wouldn't start at all. It'd do the classic "powering up" ... "almost there"... GSOD, lather, rinse, repeat.

I upgraded him to a 160 Gb Samsung drive a few years ago. I took that drive out and ran Spinrite on it. Spinrite found about four or five unrecoverable sectors and mapped them out. I put the drive back in the TiVo but the Spinrite fix didn't help.

I searched and found some instructions posted by Robert S in 2002 about the swap partition not being big enough for the filesystem to fix itself. I'm thinking this is my next step, but I'm wondering if that is still the right approach (it was posted 5 years ago).

My dad really needs to save recordings (hey, Father's Day is coming up, can't lose all his stuff!). Once I get it working again I'll probably put in a WD 250 Gb drive.

Also, I've still got the original 30 Gb drive that I took out in 2002 that I can use as a last resort.

Thanks in advance for your help.

[Mars]

Try copying it using dd_rescue. It will attempt to repair bad blocks of data as it copys. You will need a new drive same size or larger than source drive. Sombody just recently composed a good set of instructions for using it and posted it in here somewhere. I wouldn't try to continue to use to troubled drive, just get your best copy off of it.

I just found the post with help on using dd_rescue. http://www.tivocommunity.com/tivo-vb/showthread.php?t=298508&highlight=dd_rescue Now this guy says to download Knoppix to find dd_rescue, but I have found it has been added to many of the the TiVo upgrade cd disks everybody is using. Just type dd_rescue at the #prompt.

[RickStrobel]

I wonder if Spinrite may have hurt more than helped. It doesn't say it anywhere explicitly, but I think it tells the drive's firmware to "de-map" the bad sectors when it's done. Maybe it only does that to the ones it's successfully recovered. If those sectors are already mapped out it may be too late for dd_rescue to recover them.

Or, does dd_rescue read every sector of the drive no matter what? (I may have just answered my own question - but would still like some confirmation)

[RickStrobel]

Got the bootdisk from mfslive.org and used the following command to move data from the old drive to the new:

dd_rescue -A -v /dev/hda /dev/hdc

Put the new one in the TiVo and it's doing the same thing for about two hours so far (the GSOD says wait three hours). I'm getting ready to leave for a while and thinking of plan B in case it doesn't fix itself after three hours. Any ideas?

[BTUx9]

umm... the 3 hour figure is for original 35-hour tivos... ones that are upgraded with larger disks can take MUCH longer (and pulling the plug while it's still working may leave MFS in an unrecoverable state)

This is a case where serial output can be useful, to know what's being found, and under what circumstances the tivo reboots.

[RickStrobel]

Can you (or anyone) point me to some instructions on how to get the serial output?

His TiVo has a bad onboard modem so I've got the serial cable going to a US Robotics external modem - that setup has worked for years. I'm guessing I could hook that up to a 9 pin serial port with a terminal program to view the output? What would the port settings be in terms of baud, stop bits, etc.? What else do I need to know?

Thanks!

[Mars]

Rick,

How did you make out with the GSOD. I've read about some people in here letting it run for over a day and getting a recovery. As for your serial port question try searching for "telenet" in this forum.

[RickStrobel]

Finally gave up tonight after letting it run for about three days. Am now trying to expand the original 30 gb drive to the 250 Gb and see it that works.