December 30, 2004 5:18 PM

TiVoFan said:

I need some help desperately.

I have two Phillips DSR6000 DirecTiVo units. I have previously added drives to both to increase capacity and they worked great...

Then, one unit recently stopped working: began to freeze-up and now only displays the initial "Welcome" screen. I suspected a hard drive failure. Swapped the drives from my other (working) DirecTiVo and the failing TiVo powered right up. Hard drive failure verified?

I replaced the drives back into my working DirecTiVo and tried to replace the 80gb and 15gb drives in the BAD TiVo with a single 160gb Maxtor ATA133 drive using InstantCake for the DSR6000.

I baked the cake using a P4 2ghz system... Baking seemed to go perfectly! I was careful to correctly connect the CDROM as Primary Slave and the hard drive as secondary master. (Simple enough.) The jumper on the CDROM was set to slave and jumper on new drive was set to master.

After instant baking completed successfully without any errors, I installed the new drive in my defective DirecTiVo --- with the drive's jumper set to master. Then, when that didn't work I tried installing the drive with its jumper set to cable select. The unit still didn't power up past the "Welcome" screen.

I tried re-baking with no success.

During each baking I get no errors reported and it finishes icing the cake each time.

I also tried baking the new 160gb drive along with the original 15gb drive in order to have a two-drive TiVo setup. But nope, it still doesn't get past the "Welcome" screen.

I figure that it's just something I am doing wrong because swapping the drives from my functioning DirecTiVo into my non-functioning DirecTiVo makes the non-functioning unit work.

I've tried to figure out where I am messing up here... What can I try next?

Thanks! Ed

Ed,

You are not doing anything wrong. There is a "quirky" issue that seems to pop up here and there and unfortunately a post that was one here, and that addressed this issue, was accidentally deleted.

Try this... Boot your InstantCake CD as you normally would and then when the InstantCake script begins, hit "ctrl-c" to interrupt it.

Then type the following:

Code:
/mfstools-2.0/mfstool restore -x -p -b -s 300 -zi /cdrom/.images/000001 /dev/hdc

That assumes that you are only restoring to one drive, connected as the secondary master. If you are restoring to two drives, add a /dev/hdd at the end of that line, but I'd recommend you stick with your single 160GB drive for now, just to ensure this is the issue.

Once the process is complete, let things reboot and then go through the "icing" process as instructed. My guess is that things will work at that point. Please let me know if it does, as we know there is a problem like this that occurs here and there, but have never gotten enough detail to replicate the problem, although it sounds like we may have finally narrowed it down.

Thx

For answers to commonly asked questions, please refer to the
InstantCake Instructions and Release Notes,
Official InstantCake Discussion Thread, and the
Official PTVnet Discussion Thread

December 30, 2004 9:14 PM

TiVoFan said:

Thanks tivoupgrade,

I tried following your directions...

Did you mean that I should wait to press until after Instantcake's screen 1 is displayed and it initially prompts for yes or no?

I did that but after it completed restoring, it did not automatically reboot to finish icing.

I then hit and after my system rebooted I answered yes to finsih icing and after a short delay it displayed the following three error codes:

error: 'edit_bootparms' failed getting active root.
error The exit code was 4.
error: Cannot continue.

It then reported that icing was complete and to install the drive into the TiVo.

Since it returned error codes I did not try installing the drive.

Did I copy the code properly?

/mfstools-2.0/mfstool_restore_-x_-p_-b_-s_300_-zi_/cdrom/.images/000001_/dev/hdc

(I put underlines between each section of the code above to indicate where spaces should be just to make the single space obvious for illustration purposes...)

Is there some other problem or should I go ahead and see if the drive works in the TiVo?

Thanks, Ed

I will have to see if I can replicate this and come up with a workaround for you. You can go ahead and try to use the drive for now, but since the process has not been completed the kernel may not have been replaced. Will have to look into it further, but if you have access to a different PC you might try to run IC again and see if it will work from start to finish and give you a booting drive.

For answers to commonly asked questions, please refer to the
InstantCake Instructions and Release Notes,
Official InstantCake Discussion Thread, and the
Official PTVnet Discussion Thread