# Maybe dead drive, stuck at "Welcome Powering Up"



## hoptownjoel (Apr 30, 2007)

Hi everybody. I'm looking for a little guidance.

I've got a Samsung SIR-S4040R and I came home today to find it stuck on "Welcome. Powering up." I power-cycled it a few times, but I got no success. It's still hanging.

The drive in it is a couple of years old (samsung 160gb aftermarket).

I pulled the drive and ran samsung's diagnostic tool on it, but it found no issues. No strange noises, and I can't get spin-up to fail.

It's been so long since I've done any real tivo hacking that I've lost touch and I don't know what to do next.

I've got the drive hooked up and booted in Ubuntu.



> ubuntu:/dev$ sudo fdisk /dev/hda
> Device contains neither a valid DOS partition table, nor Sun, SGI or OSF disklabel
> Building a new DOS disklabel. Changes will remain in memory only,
> until you decide to write them. After that, of course, the previous
> ...





> ubuntu:/dev$ sudo fsck /dev/hda
> fsck 1.38 (30-Jun-2005)
> e2fsck 1.38 (30-Jun-2005)
> Couldn't find ext2 superblock, trying backup blocks...
> ...


I don't know what to do now since I can't see partitions or file structure. Help?

Thanks,

Joel


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## HomeUser (Jan 12, 2003)

Unless your version of ubuntu has been modified fdisk does not know how to handle the TiVo modified MFS partitions. I think the command you need is pdisk. I'd boot the MFSTools LBA48 CD which knows about the TiVo partition table layout. Start with some safe commands like cat /proc/partitions or mfsinfo /dev/hd?


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## hoptownjoel (Apr 30, 2007)

Ok. I got it booted w/ mfstools iso. The partition map looks fine. I checked my root partition (7) and mounted it.

I just did some silly things like:

find /mnt | grep a
ls -R /mnt

etc

At the very beginning, it threw an error similar to this (but not exactly -- scrolled too fast):

EXT2-fs error (device 0:3): ext2_find_entry: directory #<somenumber>
contains a hole at offset <someoffset>

I couldn't reproduce the error after the first time.

The only other observation I have is that listing directory contents feels much "slower" for /dev/hda7 (active root) than it does when I try /dev/hda4.

Thoughts?


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## HomeUser (Jan 12, 2003)

I assume the hole is probably because all the partition links are not mounted the same as they would be when in the TiVo.



hoptownjoel said:


> listing directory contents feels much "slower" for /dev/hda7


 Symptom of failing sectors, Solution dd_rescue to a new drive. and possibly run maketivobootable if the new drive still won't boot.


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## hoptownjoel (Apr 30, 2007)

Thanks much. I'm trying dd_rescue. It's about halfway done with 55 errors (1804kb worth), so I dunno how much luck I'll have w/ the final product.


Worst case scenario, it looks like instantcake might be a winner. Never used it, but it looks pretty straightforward.


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## HomeUser (Jan 12, 2003)

I have never used IC either I think it is script driven, good luck. Curious that the Samsung's diagnostic did not detect the bad areas however.


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## hoptownjoel (Apr 30, 2007)

Well, the dd_rescue'd drive got me further, but it crashed in a loop. After 72 hours of fooling with it, I gave up.

I went ahead and used instantcake and it was pretty quick and painless and worked ok. I just wish I didn't have to reprogram my season passes (I had about 300). Hey, on the bright side, I doubled my disk space from 160 to 320gb.


Thanks again HomeUser.


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