"Almost There..."

[littlelibo]

HELP!!!

I have a hughes DirecTivo which about three months ago froze in the "Almost there.." welcome screen. After searching the forums, I decided it had to be the hard drive. I have tried 2 new hard drives with no success. What else could be causing this problem?

[genericuser]

Are you saying that the Hughes unit was completely "stock" and that one day it just stopped working?

When you say it freezes... Does it actually frreze? Or does it reboot to the "Weolcome... Powering up" screen?

[littlelibo]

that is correct... one day it worked.... next day, it didn't.

no reboots... it just freezes in the almost there screen

any suggestions?

[lucid]

how about more info, what did you have on the other 2 drives?
:confused:

[littlelibo]

the two drives were brand new. all i did was put the hughes image on them using hindsdale's guide

[captain_video]

Check the FAQ for boot-up related problems. I'd be willing to bet that it's related to the white ribbon cable that connects the power supply to the mainboard. Was the image you used the original image that you created from a backup or was it an image of the drive after you started experiencing the bootup problem? If you made a backup of the drive after the problem began then all you did was transfer the same problem to your other drives. You may have a corrupted rc.sysinit file that's causing the boot problem. Try installing the drive in your PC as the secondary master and restore the backup rc.sysinit file. Use a Linux boot disc and mount the drives to get into the partitions. The 2.5Xtreme or TurboNet installation CD works fine for this (I had a problem trying this with the MFSTools CD). Set up your PC to boot from the CD and get the "#" prompt. Then do the following (press Enter at the end of each line):

mkdir /4
mkdir /7
mount /dev/hdc4 /4
mount /dev/hdc7 /7
cd /4/etc/rc.d
cp rc.sysinit.bak rc.sysinit
chmod +x rc.sysinit
chattr +i rc.sysinit

Press Ctrl+Alt+Del to shut down Linux and reboot. When the POST screen starts with the drive info, shut down the PC and restore everything in your DTivo. If the rc.sysinit file was bad, it should boot fine once the backup has been restored.

[littlelibo]

I used an image that was pm'd to me. As far as I can tell it is a good image.

[psyton]

Check to see if you have shell access. The same thing just happened to me, and even though bash is started at the end of rc.sysinit, it had started, so in my case, some process was "hanging" the system. It ended up being modemtest (maybe my modem is one the way out). Once I killed that process, the system continued booting. I am guessing that either modemtest held some semaphore or event signals some other process so that "booting" could continue...

Just because it doesn't appear to boot, don't rule out checking if you have bash access. If you do, execute ps x for a list of active processes, and take it from there...

- psyton