GSOD/HD problem

[dturturro]

I have a Phillips DTiVo with a pair of Maxtor HD's (120Gb & 160Gb-I replaced the Quantum Fireball 40GB with 2 120Gbs but 1 crapped out and Maxtor replaced it with a 160Gb).

Yesterday, I got a GSOD and it kept rebooting after the Welcome, and Just a few more seconds screens.

I immediately pulled the drives and ran Maxtors Powermax diagnostic program. Both drives came up error free. I then backed them up and reinstalled the drives. Got the GSOD, but no reboot loop.

Next I reinstalled an old backup on each drive, individually. When I reinstalled them the 160 powered up fine but the 120 got GSOD and reboot.

I deceided to go with the 160 until I replaced the other drive so I ran maddtb4 to expand the 160. When I reinstalled the 160 i'm getting the GSOD without the reboot.

As if this wasn't enough, the powermax is not reading the 120 for further diagnostics and my DVD (which I removed for the Secondary Master) is not reading any more.

Any ideas on my problems?

[SR712]

The PC problem could be a bad IDE cable. Try another.

[poppagene]

If your computer isn't reading the dvd and the 120 gb maxtor, then you likely have an ide cable problem or the drives aren't jumpered correctly (although on some motherboards, a bad cmos battery could cause these issues).

If the backup is good, try restoring it using the tiger's mfs2.0 tools to expand the drive and while you're at it make sure that you create a large enough swapfile to support further expansion.

[dturturro]

Well I made some progress:

I ruled out the IDE cable by putting the 160 back in and using mfs2.0 (thank you pop!) to expand the drive.

I also know the DVD problem can't be jumpers because I didn't touch them.

I plan on calling Maxtor about the 120, but I don't know what to do about the DVD.

Any thoughts would be appreciated.

[SR712]

It still could be the cable. Did you swap it for another one to the DVD?

[captain_video]

You need the Tivo alone when you get the GSOD and it's not rebooting on its own. It will eventually fix itself in as little as 15 minutes or as long as 24 hours or even longer in extreme cases. I've never had a GSOD that didn't recover on its own. Plug it back in and leave it be. The GSOD is caused by something corrupt in the Tivo filesystem and the GSOD appears when the Tivo goes into a "self-healing" mode. As long as you set up the correct swap file size when you performed the upgrade it should clear itself. However, if you failed to increase the size of the swap file to 128kb (the -s 127 switch in mfsrestore), the GSOD will never clear since there's not enough space in the swap file for it to work with based on your total capacity (i.e. > 140GB). I just upgraded a Hughes GXCEBOT the other day and got the GSOD when I plugged everything back in. I left it alone and it was up and running again in about 20 minutes.