# Repeated GSoD attempting to upgrade to 500Gb HDD



## mavjop (Sep 13, 2006)

I have spent far too much of the past N hours trying to make a 500Gb HDD work in my new Series 2 Dual-Tuner TiVo. I am at my wits' end. 

I used ptvlba48-4.04.iso from ptvupgrade to boot a PC with the 80Gb Western Digital drive that came with the TiVo and the 500Gb Seagate drive I purchased for the upgrade, and followed the Hinsdale How-To "UPGRADE CONFIGURATION #3: " instructions for upagrading from a single A drive to a new larger A drive.

Whether I use "-s 127" with mfsrestore or "-s 300" or "-s 512", I get the same result: start-up, GSoD for a few seconds, reboot, start-up, GSoD ... you get the idea. The same repeated series of reboots, ad nauseum. From what I've read, it appears that "-s 127" doesn't work because using a 500Gb drive requires more than 127Mb of swap, and the larger swap sizes don't work because mfstools is broken. 

I have tried booting with the ptv CD, and with a Kazymyr CD, and with the latter I can run "mkswap -v0 /dev/hdb7" (which is the swap partition on the new drive; I have the old drive as hda and the new as hdb [yes, same controller... but there's no shows on it yet, so it takes less than 10 minutes to copy, despite the disks being on the same controller]), but that simply says it's truncating the swap space to what looks like 127Mb. 

Since it looks like WeakKnees (I think) are selling 500Gb and 750Gb drives, it MUST be possible, but I can't for the life of me find a solution.

Please help! 

Thanks in advance,
Stephen


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## JamieP (Aug 3, 2004)

mavjop said:


> I have spent far too much of the past N hours trying to make a 500Gb HDD work in my new Series 2 Dual-Tuner TiVo. I am at my wits' end.
> 
> ...


The Hinsdale instructions leave out a critical parameter when upgrading large drives: *-r 4*. Without this, you'll GSOD if any partitions added are > 274GB.

I encourage anyone caught by this to write to the guide author and beg him to either pull the guide, or update it to reflect current practice for large drives.

The Weaknees instructions are up-to-date and are a better alternative.

As to swap, see the two schools of thought post.


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## mavjop (Sep 13, 2006)

JamieP said:


> The Hinsdale instructions leave out a critical parameter when upgrading large drives: *-r 4*. Without this, you'll GSOD if any partitions added are > 274GB.
> 
> I encourage anyone caught by this to write to the guide author and beg him to either pull the guide, or update it to reflect current practice for large drives.
> 
> ...


Thanks for the speedy and helpful response JamieP!

I wish I could say it all worked straight off after trying what you said, but I'm paranoid about losing everything if I ever get a GSoD in the future, so I really wanted to make swap bigger than 127Mb... so I used "mfsbackup -Tao - /dev/hda | mfsrestore -s 512 -r 4 -xzpi - /dev/hdb" (adding the -r 4) and then tried tpip (1.2, from the ptvupgrade CD) to initialise the swap partition, since I knew mfsrestore wouldn't do it right. I tried simply "tpip --mkswap" and with "tpip -s -1" (says it's series 1 now, but I saw people referring to doing that in the thread you refer to, so thought I'd give it a try).

Now, it no longer does the repeated GSoD thing, but instead shows "Welcome...", then "Just a few minutes more...", then the output (composite) stops outputting a signal to the monitor.

Any further ideas or perhaps clarifications for someone (me!) who while he really ought to be technical enough to get all this, is finding figuring out what versions and options to use and what to do in general a little baffling? 

Regards,
Stephen


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## JamieP (Aug 3, 2004)

mavjop said:


> Any further ideas or perhaps clarifications for someone (me!) who while he really ought to be technical enough to get all this, is finding figuring out what versions and options to use and what to do in general a little baffling?


You do have to tell tpip you have a series 1 or it gets the byte order wrong. It's covered if you follow the myriad of links starting from the link I referenced before.

Follow the instructions in one of the links for verifying that your swap space is recognized by checking the kernel log. If necessary, post the kernel log.

If all else fails, live with a 127MB swap.


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## mavjop (Sep 13, 2006)

JamieP said:


> You do have to tell tpip you have a series 1 or it gets the byte order wrong. It's covered if you follow the myriad of links starting from the link I referenced before.
> 
> Follow the instructions in one of the links for verifying that your swap space is recognized by checking the kernel log. If necessary, post the kernel log.
> 
> If all else fails, live with a 127MB swap.


Huh. So, I re-copied with -s 127 (specifically, *mfsbackup -Tao - /dev/hda | mfsrestore -s 127 -r 4 -xzpi - /dev/hdb*) and booted it in the TiVo. It did the same "Welcome..." -> "Just a few more minutes..." -> no longer outputting composite. Then, on a whim, I tried hitting the TiVo button on the remote (why did I not do this before?), and damned if the thing didn't come on. I am now thinking (since the "failure" was the same) that I'll retry with a larger swap and *tpip -s -1 /dev/hdb* and see if that works the same way.

I wonder if that's because I suspended (I think) before turning off the TiVo and pulling the original disk to copy to the new one.

Thanks, JamieP, for being so helpful! You rock.

Regards,
Stephen


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## mavjop (Sep 13, 2006)

mavjop said:


> Huh. So, I re-copied with -s 127 (specifically, *mfsbackup -Tao - /dev/hda | mfsrestore -s 127 -r 4 -xzpi - /dev/hdb*) and booted it in the TiVo. It did the same "Welcome..." -> "Just a few more minutes..." -> no longer outputting composite. Then, on a whim, I tried hitting the TiVo button on the remote (why did I not do this before?), and damned if the thing didn't come on. I am now thinking (since the "failure" was the same) that I'll retry with a larger swap and *tpip -s -1 /dev/hdb* and see if that works the same way.


Yes!!! I re-did the copy with -s 512:

```
mfsbackup -Tao - /dev/hda | mfsrestore -s 127 -r 4 -xzpi - /dev/hdb
tpip -s -1 /dev/hdb
```
... and it worked!!! 

Just to make sure it was _really_ mounting 512Mb of swap, I pulled the drive and hooked it back up to the PC, booted the PVT CD, and did the following:

```
mkdir /mnt/var
mount /dev/hdb9 /mnt/var
grep -i swap /mnt/var/log/kernel
```
... and I got:

```
Jan 2 00:01:07 (none) kernel: Starting swapd
Jan 2 00:01:07 (none) kernel: Activating swap partitions
Jan 2 00:01:07 (none) kernel: Adding Swap: 524280k swap-space (priority -1)
```
mfstools claims 583hrs, and TiVo Account/System Information claims 560hrs. I'm not going to concern myself with the discrepancy. 

Thank you, JamieP, for saving the day! :up:

Regards,
Stephen


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## JamieP (Aug 3, 2004)

Glad it worked. I should have thought of the standby on powerup thing.


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## StGeorgeVI (Oct 19, 2006)

Thanks to you both for this thread. Last weekend, I upgraded my 40GB Series 2 to 400GB without stress.

Thank you for documenting the command parameters, describing each step of the procedure, and warning me about the dropped composite output. There were no surprises.

I found this thread via a link on Stephen's blog.


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