# S2 upgrade to SATA failed...why?



## MarkL (Jul 1, 2005)

I have a TCD2400040 that had a 120GB and 160GB drive set in it. over the last few weeks the system had begun to freeze during playback of certain recordings (never in the same spot, however) and required a reboot via power pull to get going again. I suspected a drive going out but was not sure.

Last week we had a short power blip, and the unit failed to boot after power was restored (it was on a surge protector) stuck on the Powering Up... screen. Assuming it was a dead HD, I ordered a Seagate 1TB SATA drive and a ByteCC SATA-to-IDE adapter.

Got the drive and adapter yesterday, cabled it up to my spare PC as necessary, and launched my InstantCake 1.0e CD for this model. Everything seemed to proceed normally and there were no error messages. However, when done it told me I had a new recoding capacity of 147 hours, not the 1000 or so I was expecting.

Put the new drive in the TiVO, including the Adapter. TivO still won't boot past the Powering Up screen.

My guess as to causes:
1) incompatible SATA-to-IDE adapter (product link. However, this adapter appears to use the JMicron chipset, which has been successfully used by others
2) bad image on the disk
3) TiVO is failing due to some other hardware problem, not disk (disk controller?)
4) bad SATA drive
5) incompatible SATA drive (Seagate Pipeline HD ST31000322CS 1TB 5900 RPM 8MB Cache SATA 3.0Gb/s 3.5" Internal Hard Drive)

My next step is to run diagnostics on the previous drives and determine if they are good or not. If I can reimage a good one and boot from it, then I've ruled out #3.

Then I will run diags on the new SATA drive, hopefully eliminating #4.

Can anyone comment on #5 or #1?

Am I leaving out anything?


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## mr.unnatural (Feb 2, 2006)

Did you expand the partitions after installing the image? If not, you'll only get as much recording capacity as the original hard drive(s) the image was taken from.


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## MarkL (Jul 1, 2005)

mr.unnatural said:


> Did you expand the partitions after installing the image? If not, you'll only get as much recording capacity as the original hard drive(s) the image was taken from.


No, I didn't, but it was my recollection that last time I used InstantCake (a couple years ago?) it did that automagically. Perhaps I am mistaken. I can certainly pull the drive and do it manually.

But surely that is not what's causing the boot failure?


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## HomeUser (Jan 12, 2003)

The converter does not have drive select jumpers try a different IDE cable one with the blue black an gray connectors.
The blue plugs into the TiVo the black to the drive.


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## MarkL (Jul 1, 2005)

HomeUser said:


> The converter does not have drive select jumpers try a different IDE cable one with the blue black an gray connectors.
> The blue plugs into the TiVo the black to the drive.


Good catch!

First thing I did earlier today was reimage both the original drives, and then tried to boot from one to rule out a hardware problem with the TiVO itself. Fortunately, it booted successfully using these newly-imaged IDE drives. This eliminated suspect #3, above.

I checked how I had the SATA drive cabled and I did indeed have the blue connector in the drive and the black connector on the TiVO mobo. I swapped the ends and tried again. It booted!

However, it still only has a capacity like a 137GB drive. I reimaged it using InstantCake again, and paid attention .. it did in fact try to run mfsadd, and said it added everything it could. I ran mfsadd manually afterwards, and still only got it to think it was a 137GB drive.

So, progress, but not success ... yet.

What's next?


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## MarkL (Jul 1, 2005)

OK I'm thinking one of two things:

- My mobo (K7S5A Pro) doesn't have a BIOS that supports LBA48. This seems unlikely however.

- IC 1.0e doesn't have an LBA48 kernel. In which case ... how do I get this drive imaged? Recall that I do have at least one IDE drive imaged with a bootable kernel from the IC procedure.


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## mr.unnatural (Feb 2, 2006)

It definitely sounds like an LBA48 issue in the Tivo software. If that's the case then you probably never realized the full capacity of the original 160GB drive either.

I'm not up to date on which OS versions support LBA48 but I suspect that if you force a few daily calls the Tivo will eventually update to the current OS version. Once that happens, try to rerun the mfsadd utility to expand the partitions. While you've got the drive pulled go ahead and make a backup image of the new OS.


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## HomeUser (Jan 12, 2003)

If MFSInfo reports that the storage size is correct your TiVo should correct itself after the installation of the new version of TiVo software. Just force a couple of connections *Message and Settings* -> *Settings* -> *Connect to the TiVo Service*. Reboot when the status is "Pending Restart"

If MFSInfo reports 137G or less you are using an old version of MFSTools. Download and try again using the MFSLive CD instead.

FYI: The computers BIOS is not a factor the Linux boot CD bypasses the BIOS limitations with it's own device handlers.


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