HDVR2 Trouble Booting

[scottym]

I screwed up something. I get the infamous "Welcome. Powering up..." screen without ever going to "almost there...".

I was telnetted into my TiVo and I wanted to restart so I typed the command "restart". Perhaps this wasn't such a good idea. Does anyone know how I could get back control of my superpatched HDVR2 without losing my programming?

Anything I can do by mounting /dev/hda on my PC?

[PlainBill]

It has been said many times, many ways.

Troubleshooting "Won't Boot" problems without knowing what is failing is a waste of time.

Build, buy, or borrow a serial cable. Instructions are found here.

Make sure your boot parameters (bootpage -p /dev/hdX) include 'dsscon=true console=2,115200'.

EDIT: To verify (and change) this:

Mount the drive in a pc (primary master is /dev/hda; primary slave is /dev/hdb, etc).

Boot from the PTVupgrade LBA-48 boot cd

Check the boot parameters bootpage -p /dev/hdX where X is the drive position (a, b, c, d).

An unhacked system will return something like root=/dev/hda4 or root=/dev/hda7

Update the boot parameters with bootpage -P "root=/dev/hdaY dsscon=true console=2,115200" -c /dev/hdX where X is the drive position in the pc, and Y is the active root partition determined above (4 or 7)

Verify the update 'took' with bootpage -p /dev/hdX

/EDIT

Hook the serial cable from the DirecTiVo to your pc.

Run Hyperterm or TeraTerm with settings of 8,n,1, 115200, no flow control.

Examine the serial console output to see what is going wrong.

If you don't understand the error message, attach the ENTIRE serial output to a post.

EDIT: For Serial bash, the following lines should be in rc.sysinit.author:

export TERM=xterm
export PS1='\h:\w$ '

#Setup HOSTNAME
hostname HDVR2

#Start BASH
/bin/bash</dev/ttyS2&>/dev/ttyS2&

PlainBill

[JoeSchmuckatell]

I'm having some difficulties with a PROM Mod on an R10. First I'd like to state that my original PROM runs the R10 just fine with a 120GB drive I use normally.

I have taken my original drive (80GB) and did the bootpage to tell the console to place the data on the serial port (57600 8N1) and all the other mods required to have a hacked DTiVo started.

I have a serial cord that I have used with my DVR-40 RCA. Should work here too.

When using the new modded PROM with either the modified or unmodified drives the power light flashes. The Welcome screen flashes ever so briefly (maybe 2 frames) before it reboots. The serial port does not indicate any activity.

My two questions:

1. At what point does the serial port start sending data? Does it do this all the time, if there is a failure, etc...

2. At what point does the "Welcome" screen get displayed? Is this a function of the PROM enabling the screen to display or time from POR (Power On Reset)?

I am looking up the booting sequence of the DTiVo. This I think will help me.

Personnaly I think the PROM is failing early in the boot process, I don't even know if there is firmware on the PROM at this time or it could be corrupt. I can have the drive disconnected and I get the same results.

I also thought I have read that the stock PROM verifies it'self, the initrd, and I thought something else but again, can't find it right now. Sometimes I just can't find the right words to put into the search engine or maybe I'm just too tired.

Thanks for any help,
Joe