can't watch recorded shows

[steveswamp]

Ok, here's a strange one. I've got a Series 2 standalone (Tivo TCD240080) that started having problems the other night. When you go to Tivo Central, and then select Now Playing, the Tivo crashes. I figured I had a bad spot on the disk, so I upgraded to a 500GB drive using a disk built at tivo.upgrade-instructions.com. MFSBackup detected an unrecoverable bad spot, which I expected. I copied the entire disk over. The new disk boots fine, but it still crashes when I try to view what's on the disk. All the other menus work fine, I can schedule recordings, add/delete season passes, get guide updates, pause the video, etc. The scheduled shows record as normal. I just can't get to see what's recorded.

I networked the tivo, which worked fine. I used the Tivo Desktop, and I could see all of the shows recorded on the machine, and I could easily transfer them to the PC. Everything seems to work here. I just can't see the recording list through the Tivo menus. Any suggestions on where to look? I'm running the latest 9.x release from Tivo (non-hacked).

My initial two thoughts - maybe something got corrupted when we had a power glitch, so there's a OS program or library screwed, or the index for the recorded files is corrupted. But with the networking experiment, I think I've got a corrupted file in my primary boot partition. Is there a way, using MFStools or something similar, to switch which partition the Tivo will boot from? I'm thinking that if I do this, maybe Tivo will see the newly made primary partition as an older version, and download an upgrade into the corrupted one. I'm trying to do it this way so I don't lose all of my existing recordings. Any suggestions?

Thanks in advance.

[WK-Michael]

That does sound like it might be a corrupted library in the OS.

You could try a kickstart 52 to see if that helps:

http://www.weaknees.com/tivo-kickstart-codes.php

[steveswamp]

still no luck...

I tried the kickstart52. It performed as advertised, downloaded the software, and restarted. However, same problem. It's possible that whatever is corrupted is a file that is the same from the last release, and thus didn't get downloaded.

The only thing I can think of is trying to force the tivo to boot off the other partition. Is there a bootpage utility that's accessible from the kickstart menu, or even as an MFStools command? It's not a problem to pull the drive out if necessary. I'm just trying to preserve the shows...

Thanks for the help.

Steve.

[WK-Michael]

We really don't recommend switching the active boot partition - it's something we haven't done in years because of the unpredictability of the results.

My guess is that you might have a motherboard problem with your MPEG decoder chip.

[steveswamp]

why would you guess that? I can play and pause live TV. IT seems menu related to me. What about power supply? I've read of some really strange things there. It's so strange because everything works correctly, except getting through the now playing menu.

How about InstantCake? Would it preserve recordings?


Thanks.

[WK-Michael]

You could try a new power supply, but I doubt that would help.

You're right - my explanation doesn't cover the live TV issue.

We really don't deal with Instant Cake, but I don't think it preserves recordings.

[steveswamp]

I'd prefer not to go the instantcake route, but I'm running out of ideas. That's why I wanted to try and flip the boot partition. Short of reimaging the drive, I'm not sure what else I can do at this point. The fact that the MFS backup/restore process of transferring everything to the new drive found an unrecoverable badspot, I'm still thinking it's a corrupted library. Any idea what the name (and path) of the library would be? I wonder if I could copy it from the inactive boot partition. It didn't seem to get updated with the kickstart, so I'm thinking it might be identical....

[WK-Michael]

Nope - that's not something we ever do (changing individual libraries). Sorry.

[steveswamp]

what package do you use to build disks there? Something internally brewed? Or do you have a "golden" drive for each type of Tivo box that you use to clone for new upgrades?

[WK-Michael]

We have a host of proprietary software here that we use.

[steveswamp]

here's a question: from what I understand, if the inactive root partition is empty, then the tivo will reload it completely, correct? If so, when I take the drive out of the PC, is there a way to tell which is the inactive root, and can I just delete the files?

[WK-Michael]

We really don't think that will happen. We think you'll just not be able to boot at all.

[steveswamp]

problem fixed, some new discoveries

Well, I ended up getting an InstantCake image and redoing the entire drive. Works fine now. So I'm guessing it was a library. However, I did learn a few things that you may not know. Maybe this will help in the future.

First, I tried to delete the inactive root files. Yes, it turns out you can do this, and the Tivo will boot fine. What I did was use MFSlive to boot the PC. Then I mounted /dev/sda9 - the /var partition under normal use. In that partition, there is a file called mtab (or mnttab - can't remember). The file contains the mounts from the last boot. It has 3 entries - swap, /var, and the active root. In this case, /dev/sda4 was active, so I mounted /dev/sda7 and deleted all the files (rm -rf *).

As the tivo was booting, I did a kickstart52 to force a sw reinstall. This worked, and I verified that the active partition was /dev/sda7 when I tore it back down. However, the Tivo never activated its network connection, and didn't have a phone connection. So it appears to have just copied all the files from the active root partition into the empty inactive partition. I expected it to go out and get files, but apparently it doesn't. I don't know if you knew that.

One thing I thought to try (after I had done the instantcake) was to have brought up the tivo, and then did a normal service update. Maybe then it would have pulled a new OS copy. Hard to say. It might also have just done a copy from the active root, and then a delta download (to keep the download time short). It would be nice to verify how the Tivo would respond in this situation, as it might save people in the future. But my wife won't let me take mine apart anymore. I've got the original disk, so I can recreate the scenario, but not likely to happen anytime soon. If you guys want the disk to experiment with, I'm sure we could work out a swap...

Anyway, thanks for your help. Hopefully what I've gleaned from it will help you guys in the future.

[WK-Michael]

We don't think TiVos ever do a "delta" download - they always get a complete OS version.

The best situation might have been if there was a new OS version available. Then it would have to do a complete replacement of the installed OS, and might have fixed that problem.

[steveswamp]

yeah, I was thinking the same thing. But when I called in to customer service, they said they couldn't even force a tivo to reload. I don't know how true that is, but this is one area that they seem to be reluctant to deal with. I'm sure it's a lot easier to sell new units...