HDVR2 300GB, hangs every 3 days after upgrade

mfryd · 01-03-2006, 02:02 PM

My original disk died, and I upgraded to a 300GB Maxtor Diamond Max 10. (it was on sale).

I copied and expanded a smaller disk from a working HDVR2, did a reset-all, and everything seemed to be working perfectly.

There is ONE problem. About every three days, the unit hangs. The screen just freezes. The power light does turn yellow when I press buttons on the remote, but both local and remote buttons are ignores.

Power cycling the unit fixes it for about another 3 days.

I've run the full Maxtor diagnostics on the drive, and it reports that the drive is fine. I've tried the acoustic management utility to swap the drive from 'fast' to 'quiet', but that didn't help.

Anyone have any ideas on what the problem is, or what I can do to fix it. (It's been like this about 2 months, and I have over 200 hours of programs my wife doesn't want me to lose).

Does it sound like the drive, the power supply, mother board issue, or software?

Should I try copying everything onto another matching drive?

The drive does draw a lot of power, can I delete some programs and copy things onto a lower power 250GB drive?

Could it be the power supply (should I try swapping in a power supply from another HDVR2)?

Does anyone have a single working 300GB drive in an HDVR2?

Thanks in advance for any help or guidance you can give me on what I should try next.

-Michael

JamieP · 01-03-2006, 02:16 PM

Quote:

Originally Posted by mfryd

There is ONE problem. About every three days, the unit hangs. The screen just freezes. The power light does turn yellow when I press buttons on the remote, but both local and remote buttons are ignores.

You might have an improperly initialized swap, if you restored with a -s value > 127. Here's one way to check. If that's the problem, you'll need to pull the drive and initialize swap with tpip as described here.

mfryd · 01-04-2006, 11:04 AM

[quote=JamieP]You might have an improperly initialized swap, if you restored with a -s value > 127....[quote]

Thanks! I think this is my problem. I created a 512MB swap partition when I restored. The boot logs show that it isn't recognized, and that there is NO swap.

I'm still a little confused as to how to fix this, the posts I've read are a bit unclear on a few points.

I have the standard DirecTV 6.2 Tivo software (no modifications). Does this version of the software actually support a swap partition greater than 127MB (the references all refer to using a custom kernel with both LB48 and extended Swap support)? I used TPIP 1.1, to add a swap header, but it still seems like the HDVR2 didn't recognize it.

Can I reduce the swap space by reducing the swap partition size with pdisk? This will leave some unused space between partitions, but on a 300GB disk I can live with some waste.

Is the only way to reduce swap space just to backup/restore the whole 300GB to a new drive, but this time specify -s 127?

-Thanks

winders · 01-06-2006, 05:05 PM

All you have to do is remove the drive from your TiVo, put it back in your PC, and issue the following command with tpip 1.1:

tpip --swapped -s /dev/hdX

The "--swapped" is what you probably missed and, if left out, results in an invalid swap header.

If you use tpip 1.2, the command is:

tpip -1 -s /dev/hdX

Scott

mfryd · 01-06-2006, 10:31 PM

I tried tpip, and tpip reported that it wrote a level 1 header.

I'm pretty sure it did something, becuase now when I boot the HDVR2, and look at the log files it says that the swap header isn't recognized (previously it said the header was bad).

Does the 6.2 DirecTV kernel recognize the new level 1 format swap header? Does anyone actually have a working HDVR2 with more than 127MB of swap?

My current plan is to mfsbackup | mfsrestore everything to a new 300GB drive, but to use -s 127 on the mfsrestore. The problem is that this takes about 30 hours on my old PC. The first time I copied it, mfsrestore failed with an out-of-memory error as it was finishing up (I am now trying again with more memory).

The reason I'm using tpip 1.1, is becuase that's the version included on the mfstools boot CD I have.

Thanks again for everyone's help.

JamieP · 01-06-2006, 10:38 PM

Quote:

Originally Posted by mfryd

I tried tpip, and tpip reported that it wrote a level 1 header.

I'm pretty sure it did something, becuase now when I boot the HDVR2, and look at the log files it says that the swap header isn't recognized (previously it said the header was bad).

Does the 6.2 DirecTV kernel recognize the new level 1 format swap header? Does anyone actually have a working HDVR2 with more than 127MB of swap?

My current plan is to mfsbackup | mfsrestore everything to a new 300GB drive, but to use -s 127 on the mfsrestore. The problem is that this takes about 30 hours on my old PC. The first time I copied it, mfsrestore failed with an out-of-memory error as it was finishing up (I am now trying again with more memory).

The reason I'm using tpip 1.1, is becuase that's the version included on the mfstools boot CD I have.

Thanks again for everyone's help.

Yes, the 6.2 kernel can use v1 swap. You sure you included --swapped on the tpip command line? Attach the kernel log to a post so we can diagnose further.

If you can enable dma on the disks, it will probably make the mfsbackup/mfsrestore transfers go much faste. Try "hdparm -d1 /dev/hda" and repeat for the other disk(s).

winders · 01-06-2006, 11:51 PM

mfryd,

Pay attention now:

All you have to do is remove the drive from your TiVo, put it back in your PC, and issue the following command with tpip 1.1:

tpip --swapped -s /dev/hdX

The "--swapped" is what you probably missed and, if left out, results in an invalid swap header.

Again:

The "--swapped" is what you probably missed and, if left out, results in an invalid swap header.

If you use tpip 1.2, the command is:

tpip -1 -s /dev/hdX

Yes, there are MANY people with an HDVR2 with more than 127MB or WORKING swap space. Your plan is a bad one since all you probably need to do is issue the correct tpip command to fix the problem and 127MB of swap space isn't enough.

Scott

mfryd · 01-07-2006, 12:54 PM

Thanks!! I now have 500MB of working swap space.

The problem was that I had tpip 1.1, but the only documents I could find were for tpip 1.2.

I was confused over --mkswap, --swap, and -s. Some specify creation of swap space, some request byte swapping, and in 1.2 more things happen automatically.

The command I needed was in fact: tpip --swapped -s /dev/hdX

Now that I have swap space, hopefully this will fix my freeze-up problems.