[gadgetgaz]

So, my TiVo suffered its first ever crash today causing me to miss recordings. It stopped mid way through a program and remained on the now showing page. The red recording LED remained on for hours fooling me into thinking it was still beavering away. I had to pull the plug to bring it back.

Is there a log that I could check to see what caused the crash?

 

[blindlemon]

tverr or kernel.

Look out for any mention of DMA or uncorrectable errors which would indicate a bad sector (or sectors) on your drive.

 

[gadgetgaz]

Thanks, but there is no mention of any unrecoverable errors or DMA errors.
The only thing that looks dodgy is that there are hundreds of these:-


Jan 3 18:13:35 (none) kernel: CodeFromNec(6e9107f0) is meaningless
Jan 3 18:14:01 (none) kernel: CodeFromNec(6e9108f0) is meaningless
Jan 3 18:14:03 (none) kernel: CodeFromNec(6e910df0) is meaningless
Jan 3 18:14:03 (none) kernel: CodeFromNec(6e910df0) is meaningless
Jan 3 18:14:05 (none) kernel: CodeFromNec(6e9107f0) is meaningless

Any clues?

 

[blindlemon]

Could have been a power glitch that knocked out the custom media switcher chip (made by NEC) which co-ordinates all the audio and video files - or maybe some minor drive corruption that resulted in garbage to the chip? Do you have your TiVo running on a UPS?

Might be worth running mfscheck (kickstart 57) if it happens again.

 

[gadgetgaz]

My crashes seem to occur a short while (i.e. within an hour or so) of me accessing tivoweb. It will run for days after a restart but then, after I browse to TiVoweb, a crash will occur mid way through a recording.

Any ideas anyone?

 

[mike0151]

That's really not good. I access TW several times a day on both my TiVos and hardly ever have a problem. (touch wood LOL). Certainly none to do with TW.

Are you running TW or TW+ ?

Mike

 

[gadgetgaz]

I am running TW, vserver and spaceused.

 

[mike0151]

I don't use vserver or spaceused. I find that TW gives me enough information about space and I use TyTool for what we cannot discuss on here.

 

[gadgetgaz]

I'll comment out all the entries in rc.sysinit.author except tw and endpad then see if it still crashes.

 

[Ian_m]

Try changing the first line of the "tivoweb" file to

export TIVOSH_POOLSIZE=3244032

I am sure this is a known problem sometimes with TiVoWeb.

 

[gadgetgaz]

OK, thanks, I've done that. Just waiting for recordings to stop so I can reboot.
What does that variable do?

 

[Ian_m]

You don't need to reboot, just quit tivoweb via the web front end and restart TiVoWeb from the bash prompt.

Without this line my TiVo was often rebooting (not locking up as in your case) when accessing TiVoWeb, with a signal -2 being recorded in the kernel log.

TiVo lockups I have seen, where nothing has been recorded in the logs have been due to failing disks. A quick smartctl revealed an ever increasing Reallocated_Sector_Ct, meaning the disk is automatically realloacting bad sectors (not good). This went on TiVo OK'ish (sometimes blocky) then suddenly lockup at menu, power cycle and nothing......Oh well new disks and PSU and all sorted.

 

[Glesgie]

The variable increases the amount of memory for tivosh.
If tivosh crashes, the tivo reboots.