# HR10-250 stuck/rebooting at "welcome powering up"



## dr_mal (Mar 21, 2001)

I feel like a n00b right now, even though I've been upgrading drives in my TiVos for years...

I've got a HR10-250. Pretty much as soon as I got it, I added a 2nd WD 250GB drive using "mfsadd -x".

Worked for a while. Then the primary drive died. So I did a dd of it to a 250GB Maxtor drive.

That worked for well over a year. Then I *think* the 2nd WD drive died (the plastic on the bottom of the drive was melted, and well, I haven't had good luck with WD drives in general). Both the WD and the Maxtor drives passed diagnostics, but I went ahead and did a dd_rescue of the WD drive to a shiny new 400GB Seagate drive. Then did a "mfsadd -x" to marry/expand the drives.

That worked for almost a week.

Then, this afternoon, it went into a reboot cycle - "Welcome Powering Up", the record lights goes on for a second, and it reboots. I never see the "Almost there...a few more seconds please" screen.

The drives are properly connected and jumpered. Like I said, it was working GREAT for a week.

Am I missing anything? My next step is to pull the Seagate drive and run diagnostics on it (I redid the full diagnostics on the Maxtor drive, and it passed again).


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## litzdog911 (Oct 18, 2002)

I suggest going back to one bigger drive rather than two drives. In my experience two-drive Tivos are just too flakey and you're never sure which drive is bad. Plus, performing a dd_rescue from a "sick" hard drive can lead to additional problems.


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## dr_mal (Mar 21, 2001)

Update - when I have the TiVo drives mounted in my PC, I see "Unknown partition table" when the boot CD attempts to read the partition table from my primary TiVo drive. The secondary TiVo drive reports the partition table correctly at boot.

When I run "pdisk -l /dev/hda", what looks like a proper partition table is printed (13 total partitions).

When I run "bootpage -p /dev/hda" I get this garbled output:
r*o*=*d*v*h*a* *r*v*0*1*0* *u*f*n*l*e*t*t*u*

I should see something like "root=/dev/hda4 ????????????" right? 2 questions:

a) why does pdisk see a proper partition table, but the boot sequence reports "unknown partition table"?

b) how did my bootpage parameter get all garbled? If I fix that (and what are the last two parameters, anyway?) you think I'd be good?


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## dr_mal (Mar 21, 2001)

Fixed!

For those of you playing along at home, here's what I had to do to fix it.

* Rewrite partition table using these instructions

Once that was done, I couldn't rewrite my bootpage, since the drive "didn't appear to be a TiVo drive." Figured out that my partitions aren't necessarily in the right order - once I had re-entered the partition table, I had to reorder the partitions so that 4/7 were the boot partitions, 3/6 were the kernels, etc.

Then I got an error when trying to boot: "Boot failed reason=53". I think what was causing this was something the PowerMax utility may have done to the disk while running the diagnostics. So I had to download and run MakeTiVoBootable. This is the same utility required if one were to accidentally boot into Windows XP with a TiVo drive attached (I did not do this).

Once that was done (and heck, I had the drives pulled and everything already) I ran Zipper. It ran successfully, I threw the drives back into the TiVo and it almost finished booting, but then rebooted. It then finished booting and has been up for a couple hours now. Finally.

Hope this helps someone else at some point (and, at worst, me, if I ever have to retrace my steps  )


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