Stuck in Guided Setup with SO3 error

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Not that anyone's figured out yet.

You'd likely need a program that enabled the PC to emulate the TiVo, including the proprietary, closed source TiVo software and hardware.


In other words, getting the TiVo to do it is the easy way.

 

Thanks. Someone on another thread suggested that using WinMFS to expand my 1tb drive to a 2tb drive and increase the swap size to 2000mb should fix the problem. Was thinking of trying that - what do you think?

 

That never helped at all, for any problems I ever had on a TiVoHD. In fact, it seemed to make things worse. I had four of them that I tried using varying sizes on.

There's a few members who insist that people should do it, because "it can't hurt". That might be true. But, I've never been able to determine that it truly "can help". I think too many people confuse TiVo's swap with Windows or Linux OS, and assume that bigger is better. Even on non-proprietary OS's, there comes a point where managing the extra size starts sapping away resources.

I think those that post it fixed something are often getting a placebo effect, due to the fact that the only time you can easily increase the size is when re-imaging. Re-imaging always makes things better than they were on a drive that's seen a lot of use, and has become fragmented.

Changing the swap size is on my list of questionable advice I see reposted, like it's fact, just because somebody read it somewhere here, or elsewhere. If it's on the internet, it must be true, right?

I seem to recall that it was important pre-Series 3, to use the correct swap size, and TiVo's default was inadequate, in certain, limited, situations. WinMFS was built around the series 2, where increasing the swap size could mean the difference between a boot-looping TiVo upon a filesystem integrity check, or the repair of whatever was detected being completed, and not having to re-image or rebuild the drive.

 

Sooo... any recommendations for getting out of the S03 loop where I don't have a telnet connection since this is an S3? Would love to preserve my recordings if possible (I've already transferred a bunch to a new Roamio - they still "see" each other even though the S3 is in the loop - but there are a bunch that are digitally protected and won't transfer), but can pull the original drive and start from scratch if I have to.

 

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Nothing that hasn't already been posted in triplicate, sorry. If I had links saved for all the best ones, I'd give them.

You'll have to do the searching yourself, or just spend the same amount of time starting over with a fully tested drive and a fresh image.

 

If you have an S03 error, but are not yet stuck in Guided Setup, run

Clear Program information & To Do List

which is less drastic than

Clear and Delete Everything

and won't erase your shows

and doesn't dump you into GS when it finishes the way C&DE does.

 

Yeah unfortunately I tried to reset the channel list which dumped me into the GS loop so I'm stuck there now.

 

Bummer.

What part of the country are you in?

 

Los Angeles

 

I think you can get a shell prompt using the serial cable, and from there give it the dbgc-mcp -fg-gc command (see my earlier post for better details)

this initiates a garbage collection, and since the Tuning Adapter and CableCards are not connected, it does not distract the TiVo from completing GC

I don't remember for sure, but don't think you have to prom mod the S3 TiVo to get the shell prompt using a serial cable, so this is probably your best bet. You can still find the serial cable online, likely from WK...

 

I came up with the idea originally and tested it along with several others trying to diagnose the problem early on. The 2GB swap solution worked for me for 3 years and then the dreaded S03 error started again. At that point I went with the easier path of the Lamp Timer and haven't looked back. My latest contribution to the band-aid is to switch power to a USB Powered Hub instead, which has worked quite well for me the last 3 months.

Perhaps a placebo effect, but the 2GB swap did work for me for 3 years before S03 reared it's ugly head again. I tested several times with and without the 2GB swap and the problem followed the smaller stock swap partition size. Without source code or direct line to the engineer that wrote the code, we were really stabbing in the dark at the time. For me since it solved the problem (temporarily) I dropped back to monitoring the forum as so many others were contributing to the understanding and I had simply offered my own experience.

Noone: Wondering if you can help me understand the difference between TiVo Swap and Linux Swap? How would somebody increase TiVo Swap space, or is this buried in the TiVo code somewhere? I don't think I am going to spend any more time on the solution myself, but really curious from your statement.

 

The only way I know (I'm sure there are other ways) to change the swap space on a TiVo is with WinMFS, or going native and using a tool like iBored, and a bunch of stuff I'm too rusty on to recall, or try to explain, at this time.

I posted some important revisions/alternatives on your post about using a powered USB hub for the TA issue, that avoids having to cut wires, here: http://www.tivocommunity.com/tivo-vb/showthread.php?p=10248658#post10248658

Using a hub that has a hard switch to set bus-power or external power, and setting it to external, plus using a lamp-timer for the hub, should eliminate the need to worry about the swap space on anything newer than a S2, and not require cutting any USB cables up, to stop bus-power pass-through.

 

Don't know about Linux, but one of the actual partitions on a TiVo, I think it's #8, is the swap partition whose size can be adjusted upwards with WinMFS or the MFS Live cd when either copying one drive to a bigger one or restoring an image to a drive larger than the original.

 

I must Thank You Very Much for this tip! I have several TiVos in my household, all with varying modifications. I did notice that I repeadedly get the S03 errors, about 6 weeks after putting fresh TiVos into service. I also notice that it's only on the S3 TiVos with the 2TB drives.

My typical solution when I see this error has been to copy the shows off, and then re-image the drive. I've even gone so far as to replace a drive, but the S03 error always comes back about 6 weeks after the drive replacement, or after the re-image, so I KNOW it's not a bad hard drive.

I wanted to test it thoroughly before reporting back, but I've been solid for 9 weeks now.

So... Since I'm lazy, I set up a crond job that runs (the "dbgc-mcp -fg-gc" command) on days of the month that have an even number (Every other day) at 3am local time. I've discovered since then that the time of the day doesn't matter, but I chose this time since it's less likely to be recording something. Since then, I've recorded stuff over the time it's doing this command, and nothing bad happens.

Thank you!!!

Questions:

1. 1. Does anyone know what Garbage Collection and Indexing really is?
2. 2. How often is it supposed to happen? (Should I be running this every day)

 

You're very welcome--glad it helped! I've been helped also by so many on these forums myself...

1. Garbage collection is essentially cleaning up all the memory structures that are marked as not needed, but the CPU has been too busy keeping up with throughput demands to get to it. I'm sure there are better definitions out there, but it's like if you never clean your room, you become a hoarder and eventually you can't get anything done.

* Indexing can refer to several things--I'll defer to others on the forum as I haven't really thought through carefully what context TiVo is indexing...

2. GC doesn't have to run every day, but it helps. It runs faster if it is done daily as there is less to clean up. Eventually, there is not enough room for TiVo to put the guide data and then the S03 problem occurs, so should run it fairly often.

 

Alright, I'm going to try switching it to run daily.

 

I like the analogy about hoarding. But, in a TiVo, it's more about the TiVo not having the resources available to "clean up", as opposed to the TiVo being lazy, or having a "disease" as many hoarders have even started calling it, or the TiVo deciding to save old newspapers and empty pudding cups "because it might have a use for them, someday".

GC is about taking out old data, that the TiVo has no need for anymore, and will take up extra system resources if left alone. But, will also take up extra resources to be removed.

As you say, indexing is something that can include so many factors, it's bound to start arguments, if anybody says "this is exactly what it does", but gets it wrong, misses something, or doesn't describe it perfectly.

The Roamios have been pretty good at doing both, in a timely manner. I've seen indexing happen multiple times a day, like after each scheduled and/or manual connection to that part of the TiVo service, until any further connections don't provide more to be indexed. This tends to imply that the primary indexing role is adding data downloaded during these connections, to where it needs to go, in the correct format. Since most of the data, most of the time, on these connections is Guide Data, I'll let everybody draw their own conclusions on the matter.

What I've seen happen, with GC, when a TiVo is "very busy", is rather than it happening once, every ~24hrs, it gets set-aside to wait until enough resources are projected to become available, and stay available, to perform it. If the TiVo is recording something, even just on one channel, never having a period of time not recording, I've seen the GC get skipped.

What gets somewhat contradictory about this GC behavior, is the obvious problem created, when the GC is not performed, and goes unperformed long enough, that even just a TiVo not recording, but still buffering all the tuners, doesn't have enough resources to deal with the extra "garbage" which has piled-up.

One option is to simply disconnect all inbound CATV/OTA coax feeds, to stop the buffering on all the tuners, and reconnect once GC has completed. This is a "once other tricks/tweaks have failed" option. It used to be easy to just tune all tuners to a (each tuner unique) channel which is so invalid, it can't tune. To improve problems with failed tunes, TiVo has made this hard to do, as a side-effect, of direct relations.

Essentially, the last thing, non-drastic, that can be done, is to disconnect everything that can give the TiVo anything new data to process, signals to process, or otherwise require resources for. The list:

1. All RF coax input connections (cable/OTA).
2. The network connections (ethernet, MoCA, bridges, USB adapters).
3. Any form of wireless networking built-in, should be disabled.

Essentially, the best option is to use only the power-in, and only use one AV output to feed a TV, disconnecting that TV link, when you don't need to be interacting.

At some point, the TiVo will be so idle, it will have nothing better to do than GC, and other maintenance routines. But, if you have a bunch of things in your ToDoList, if you don't clear them out, first, the TiVo may still resist GC, thinking it will be busy, regardless of anything else insuring it won't be.

I have used a repeat of Guided Setup to temporarily change to "00000" Zip Code, and provider lineup "Tiny TiVo" as another step, to insure any downloaded guide data is tiny simple empty placeholders, that will be the smallest Guide Data download possible, and get data mostly devoid of anything to process/index. This allows for having the networking online, with minimal impact on indexing/GC. It's also a nooneuknow original find, that you will find no mention of, before I found it, when I decided to see what would happen if I used 00000 as a zip code. This works on all TiVos. I've lost count on how many times it has helped people, how many uses it works for, and how many potential uses it has.

 

All good information, thank you. I wonder why Garbage Collection doesn't execute properly on my TiVos with 2TB drives, but it does (without my intervention) on my TiVos with 1TB drives.

 

I have an old S3 which lost its external drive several months ago. I took the opportunity to replace the internal drive with a 2 TB using WinMFS and have had no trouble with the GC and indexing keeping the program guide up to date.

 

I upgraded my OLED Series 3 to a 500GB hard drive on way back in early 2008 and my GC has been working fine for the past 6 years, but a few weeks ago out of nowhere i started getting the S03 Error for the first time and my GC was stuck and severely out of date, with guide data running out within a few days. This has never ever happened until a few weeks ago, corresponding with Time Warner turning off our QAM channels that we used to get straight from the wall (requiring we use a digital adapter now.

I've been monitoring my GC and Service Connections over the past few weeks and sometimes GC executes ok and Service Connections succeed, but other times GC gets stuck for 3-5 days and Connections start to Fail with Error S03. The last two times this happened, i turned my Tuning Adapter OFF for a few hours and that allowed GC to complete and update to the current date, whereupon i force a connection or let it connect on it's own and those succeed as well. So far it's hit or miss. I've ordered a digital 7-day lamp timer to shut off the TA a few times a week.