[Philly Bill]

I don't get it man. You told me what to do and it worked.

After the mfsbackup and mfsrestore is done.... and it reports the new drive sizes and returns the Linux prompt I typed in the tpip command just as you specified. Took like a half second. Then I pulled the drive and put it back into the TIVO no problem

Think it matters that I'm running 6.2 and you're runing 7.x?


Also (I'm sure this has nothing to do with it) I copied recordings over..

 

[Philly Bill]

Maybe it is the version, who knows. I gave up yesterday. Yeah, tpip runs in a sec and says the 192 swap space is initialized. No errors. mfsinfo reports the partitions properly. It all looks ok.

Weird.

So I'm confused. Did it work? Or no?

 

[Philly Bill]

<Twilight Zone Music>

Man, I'm lost.

It appears to work ok. I had not mentioned this to Slap earlier but yesterday AM the TIVO 'froze up' watching the Today show. I rebooted and its been fine since. I don't know if the swap file is needed for normal viewing or not.

I'll be happy to do whatever anyone else wants to check into this thing. I don't have FTP access to the TIVO its pretty much standard at this point only with a 300GB hard drive. I wouldn't know how to access the logs.

I would prefer to not have to do it again only cause I recorded a few shows over the weekend I'd like to see.. but I can watch 'em first I guess.

I'm gonna be doing this again this weekend on my dad's DTIVO so maybe we can figure out something before then. If not I'll just do his with the -s 127 option and no tpip.

Let me know if I should try/do something to help out.

Bill

PS: Thanks for translating Jamie for me. My head was spinning.

 

[Philly Bill]

[email protected]

Thanks.

I agree. Sounds like a fix is in order. A little shuffling of my season pass for Survivor I to my second TIVO is in order...

Sounds like you guys will figure out what I should do by the weekend on dad's upgrade.

Thanks.

BTW I *DO* want to hack this TIVO and learn more about it as I go along. The upgrade was done at this time mainly so my pops would go seamlessly when he gets here and we don't have to spend the entire week I have to visit with him trying to fix a TIVO.

Jamie, if I don't have a swap file.. it sounds like some sort of overload of the available memory could cause a problem like I had yester morning? The one time 'freeze' of my TIVO? I'm not sure what could cause the memory stretch just having the TIVO on.. but I imagine it could have been one of a number of things.

Thanks you guys.

 

[Philly Bill]

Thats cool!

Thanks for the detailed instructions. I'll pull it tonight, load it to the PC and let you guys know what I find.

Curious. What does 'booting the TIVO up' and pulling the plug do?

By the way, the TIVO is already up and running at home. I can just pull the plug when I get home and pull the drive can't I? I don't have to do a fresh reboot first do I?

 

[Philly Bill]

LOL. The answer to the first question answered the 2nd. Thanks. I'll reboot tonight after work sometime, pull the drive and post the results.

You want to see the logs right after the tivo has 'rebooted' (that is, just powered up). So you need to plug it in and let it start up, then immediately after it is all the way started (that is, once you can get to the tivo menus on your tv), unplug it and take out the drive to examine in your PC.A fresh reboot is important. The log files 'roll over' periodically, and if it's been a while since it was rebooted, the information about swap space may no longer be in the logs.

 

[Philly Bill]

LOL. I just logged on to report the same. I'll switch back and try again. Stand by for report.

Bill

 

[Philly Bill]

Ok, here we go Jamie...

After changing the grep command to the proper path, I got the following (I wrote this down and am retyping because I don't know how to copy from a 'command' session if possible at all.

(below is what comes up after the grep -i swap /mnt/var/log/kernel command)

Jan   2   00:00:41 (none) kernel: Starting kswapd
Jan   2   00:00:41 (none) kernel: Activating swap partitions
Jan   2   00:00:41 (none) kernel: Adding Swap: 65532k swap-space (priority -1)
Jan   2   00:00:40 (none) kernel: Starting kswapd
Jan   2   00:00:40 (none) kernel: Activating swap partitions
Jan   2   00:00:40 (none) kernel: Adding Swap: 65532k swap-space (priority -1)
Bus error

Seem's like a lot smaller number than you had.

I got that Bus error every time I tried it too. May be insignificant?

 

[Philly Bill]

Yeah, I saw 64k.

I know I put the option in properly... but I musta done something wrong. I'll have to redo.

I'm pretty certain I used these commands (with hdX as the orig TIVO drive and hdY as the new 300GB drive:

mfsbackup -Tao - /dev/hdX | mfsrestore -s 192 -r 4 -xzpi - /dev/hdZ

after it finished:

tpip -s /dev/hdZ

I've certainly made my mistakes before though

So let's see. I could do this again next week if needed (after I watch two shows I recorded that I can't re-record) but I want to nail it down before this weekend so I can do my dad's with no problems.

I have an extra 300GB drive I'll be using later that I could 'redo' with now for testing I guess.

So it seems I can still use the commands above (in red) except I need to be sure I have tpip ver. 1.2? I get that from www.courtesan.com? I downloaded it but the tar/zip file had a bunch of files in there.. readmes and c code and such. Do I just need the one file called 'tpip'?

I am not home to try this, but if I D/L the .iso for PTVupgrades CD can I replace the tpip on there with the 'new one' before buring it to a CD?

After the CD is created with the proper tpip program then I can do the same thing (same commands up above in red EXCEPT to add the -1 switch to the tpip command) and it should work?

Like I said I can try this again tonight using a different 300GB drive to see how it works...

BTW, is it possible to just use the current drive and REDO the tpip command with the new version? <wishful thinking>

 

[Philly Bill]

Strangely enough, If you force tpip to think it is working with a byteswapped Series 1 disk, then it does seem to create a good v1 swap header for a Series 2. With the 1.1 version, add the "--swapped" argument (note: that's two dashes).

Since I'm not gonna be able to figure how to get tpip 1.2 onto a CD maybe this will work? The double dashed '--swapped' argument?

It looks like ggdvisloop did that in THIS thread and I was thinking of maybe trying it (unless you guys did and it didn't work and I just overlooked it).

Bill

 

[Philly Bill]

Ok, here's what I did.

Per slaponte, I tried running tpip 1.2 off a floppy. Worked fine... indicated all ok. It may well have been, but instead of putting the HD into my normal TIVO I put it into another one that the original image didn't come from... long story. Anyway I had to do a Clear & Delete Everything and that may have screwed me up.

When I did a grep after doing a boot in the TIVO and unplugging, it still only showed a 64k swap.

So... I redid everything.... without copying recordings.

(original TIVO drive was hda - hdX & new 300GB drive was hdb - hdZ)

mfsbackup -f 9999 -so - /dev/hdX | mfsrestore -s 192 -r 4 -xzpi - /dev/hdZ

After it finished I kept using the tpip off the PTV CD - which is ver 1.1 I believe...

I issued this command:

tpip --swapped -s /dev/hdZ

The results of the tpip command indicated (as it had in the past) a sucessful 192k swap created.

I put the drive back in the TIVO and rebooted. Then pulled the plug after finished rebooting and put the drive back into the PC. After booting, I followed Jamie's instructions (above somewhere) about doing a 'grep' command on the drive.

Unlike last night, tonight I showed different results:

grep -i swap /mnt/var/log/kernel

produced:

Jan 2 00:00:40 (none) kernel: Starting kswapd
Jan 2 00:00:40 (none) kernel: Activating swap partitions
Jan 2 00:00:40 (none) kernel: Adding Swap: 65532k swap-space (priority -1)
Jan 2 00:00:41 (none) kernel: Starting kswapd
Jan 2 00:00:41 (none) kernel: Activating swap partitions
Jan 2 00:00:41 (none) kernel: Adding Swap: 65532k swap-space (priority -1)
Jan 2 00:00:41 (none) kernel: Starting kswapd
Jan 2 00:00:41 (none) kernel: Activating swap partitions
Jan 2 00:00:41 (none) kernel: Adding Swap: 196600k swap-space (priority -1)

I assume this did it?

 

[Philly Bill]

Is there anything that will change this? The drive I did it to will not go into a TIVO for real until later when I redo it... but I'll use this method when I do my dad's this weekend. I'll verify with grep again that the swap on that one is the right size. I'll let it run a few days... then pull it again and check it to see if its changed.

Unless that is meaningless. Once the swap is created is there nothing that can change it?

BTW Sergio, I guess you read I used 1.2 on the floppy (which worked great by the way) but I still only ended up with a 64k swap file... so I did it again with 1.1 (on the CD) and the --swapped option which seemed to work.

I have another issue unrelated to swap file but I'll post that in a different thread in this forum to keep this thread on topic.

 

[Philly Bill]

I guess winders had 1.2?

 

[Philly Bill]

So if I put 192 in my restore line, how come it says my swap file is 196600k? I guess that is 192 * 1024 which = 196608.

Funny, when grepping it says something like:

Adding Swap: 196600k swap-space

That would really be 196,600,000 bytes. It SHOULD say: 192k *OR* 196608 bytes.

LOL.

 

[Philly Bill]

I just did dad's last night. Went without a hitch. Same instructions using 192 and when doing tpip command at the end used the --swapped parm.

Grepped the drive and got the 196MB size for swap file message too.

You guys rock

 

[Philly Bill]

:up:

 

[Philly Bill]

What is TWP info?

 

[Philly Bill]

Jan 2 00:00:40 (none) kernel: Starting kswapd
Jan 2 00:00:40 (none) kernel: Activating swap partitions
Jan 2 00:00:40 (none) kernel: Adding Swap: 65532k swap-space (priority -1)
Jan 2 00:00:41 (none) kernel: Starting kswapd
Jan 2 00:00:41 (none) kernel: Activating swap partitions
Jan 2 00:00:41 (none) kernel: Adding Swap: 65532k swap-space (priority -1)
Jan 2 00:00:41 (none) kernel: Starting kswapd
Jan 2 00:00:41 (none) kernel: Activating swap partitions
Jan 2 00:00:41 (none) kernel: Adding Swap: 196600k swap-space (priority -1)

First a question. Then a comment after I hear opinions.

I'm addressing this to JamieP because he's the one that brought up how to use grep to verify the swap file size... but if anyone else has an opinion I'm all ears.

In the example (above) there are *two* sets of messages. I know Jamie told us that the first displays were from earlier log entries and that the last one I highlighted was the most recent.

My question is this. Do the 'clock/timing' numbers to the left mean anything? Or is the 'current' log entry the one on the bottom?

The reason I ask is because I've seen displays of mutiple messages where the 'timing' marks indicated 00:00:41, 00:00:40 & 00:00:39 for the bottom 'set'. And the swap file in each as follows: the top set: 00:00:41 - swap size 64MB; the second set: 00:00:40 - swap size 64MB; the bottom set: 00:00:39 - swap size 192MB.

Now does the :41 indicate the most recent log entry? Or being at the 'top' does that make it an EARLIER log entry?

I'm assuming the timing marks are meaningless (in this instance) and that the most recent log entry would be the last one (on the bottom) - the one that shows 192MB of swap size.

In other words, IF the output looked like THIS, would the bottom display (192MB) be the most recent? Or the top one? (or maybe I read it wrong and this isn't even possible to display this way):

Jan 2 00:00:40 (none) kernel: Starting kswapd
Jan 2 00:00:40 (none) kernel: Activating swap partitions
Jan 2 00:00:40 (none) kernel: Adding Swap: 65532k swap-space (priority -1)
Jan 2 00:00:39 (none) kernel: Starting kswapd
Jan 2 00:00:39 (none) kernel: Activating swap partitions
Jan 2 00:00:39 (none) kernel: Adding Swap: 196600k swap-space (priority -1)

I know this sounds so confusing, but I'm betting you guys will understand what I'm getting at.

Bill

 

[Philly Bill]

This is pretty much what I thought Sergio. Thanks loads. I figured the log was appended to just like most files.. on the bottom. So the bottom-most 'entry' would be the most recent. The timing marks (or whatever they are) are what confused me. They may just be marks to group certain messages together.. who knows?

NOW that THAT is answered... on to the GOOD news....

As you all read previously in this thread, this whole 'grep' 'logs' thing came up because when I replaced my 40GB with a 300GB and did the tpip command I ended up with only a 64MB swap file. I've had various 'freezes' take place 4 times or so over the last month - and I attribute it to this.

Since then I've done the same thing (40GB to 300GB) two more times, and used the --swapped parm in the (version 1.1) tpip command (also discussed above). Both times resulted in a 192MB swap file and so far - no freezes. The machines are performing flawlessly.

After discussing with Sergio last week we decided to try something. When I originally did the 40GB to 300GB (the first one with the bad swap file) I DID specify the -s 192 in the restore command... so Sergio told me to do the tpip command AGAIN correctly this time.

I did that yesterday and the result IS in fact a 192MB swap file now.

So I didn't have to do it over again.

I'll be watching carefully in the coming weeks to be sure I get no more 'freezes'.

Now that we know how to use tpip correctly I don't guess this announcement means much... but I thought you'd like to know how it worked out.

Thanks Sergio.

Bill

 

[Philly Bill]

I believe these messages are coming out of the kernel before the clock has been set. So everything is relative to the time of the boot (00:00:00). Later, the clock gets set and log messages begin to have real time stamps (in UTC, IIRC).

Ah.... so I could get a set of swap messages with 40 seconds on the stamp, then 39 seconds.. then 41 seconds... and so on... depending on how long the thing took to book up.

Makes sense. I'm convince now that I really do have a 192MB swap. I'll just watch it now for the freezings... :fingerscrossed: