HR10-250: Stuck at Welcome... Not HD?

[jetsam732]

Hi,

My HR10-250 has recently gone grey.

It had been upgraded to larger drives but nothing in the hack department.

Anyway, the device will not boot up. I tried replacing the original drive, cables, etc. In all cases I get the same hang - stuck at the Welcome. Powering up.

Any ideas or pointers? While not completely up on everything here, I have searched the Broken Tivo listings and not seen the same problem (or I've missed it). Most problems point to HD failure, and I think I've ruled that out.

If it is toast, any pointers on the plan (if any) for recovering the files?

many thanks,

sj

[drez]

Did you copy the drive with -r 4 if the drive is >250GB?

[jetsam732]

I think it was all "sized up" properly - the upgraded system had been working great and for quite a while (over a year). Thus it has lots of stuff on it I'd like to keep.

I also tried digging the old drive off the shelf and putting it back in. Same results with the original, unmodified drive.

I think I tried all the easy fixes (drive swap, cable swap, unplug it for a day or so) - but couldn't find anything like a "hard reset" for the motherboard or the like.

[PlainBill]

A couple of ideas. I agree, you have eliminated hard drive failure. Two possibilities exist: A failure of the main board, and a bad power supply. If the top of the large capacitor on the power supply is bulging upward, replace it.

A serial cable may give information on the failure; I seem to remember it defaults to the menu (or the password prompt) if no hard drive is found.

Since the system was unhacked, any chance of recovering recordings depends on getting the present main board working or swapping the crypto chip to a new mainboard.

PlainBill

[jetsam732]

Thanks for the info on the options.

Looks like the power supply is my main suspect. Between that suspicion and the serial port info, I should be able to find my way through.

thanks

[Strfish7]

A couple of ideas. I agree, you have eliminated hard drive failure. Two possibilities exist: A failure of the main board, and a bad power supply. If the top of the large capacitor on the power supply is bulging upward, replace it.

A serial cable may give information on the failure; I seem to remember it defaults to the menu (or the password prompt) if no hard drive is found.

Since the system was unhacked, any chance of recovering recordings depends on getting the present main board working or swapping the crypto chip to a new mainboard.

PlainBill

I'm having a similar issue...hard drive spins up, but the unit won't boot past "almost there." No clicking when mb disconnected with power supply; no visible damage to capacitors. Since the unit has lifetime service, I'm interested in a fix beyond what a new unit might cost. Which is the crypto chip? How difficult is it to swap out? Where would be the best place to find a main board to swap with? I have a TCD540040 Series 2. Thanks in advance for any help.

[ronnythunder]

"welcome" and "almost there" are two very different states. you'll get "welcome" if there's not even a hard drive in the machine at all. to get "almost there", that means a drive is in there, it's properly formatted and partitioned (well, the root partition, anyway), the linux kernel has loaded and is executing, the startup script is running and has gotten part of the way into the boot process. there are, however, a number of things that happen after that, not the least of which is starting mfs, which is probably where most "almost there" hangs happen.

bottom line: if you get to "almost there", it's highly doubtful that you have a hardware problem unless it's drive related.

ronny

[Strfish7]

Thank you for your response to a noob...to go into a bit more detail, the unit switches off a couple of minutes after the "almost there" screen (the green power light goes off and will not respond to the remote). Should also mention that I was in the process of upgrading from a 40 gb drive to a 160 gb...using MFSLive. Both the original drive and the upgrade spin when powered on and continue after the unit shuts down. I suppose I should test the drives by placing them in a "good" box, which I may be able to access, but I'd sure welcome any other hints or suggestions about which direction I should take from here...I'd hate to give up on this unit if it's repairable.

[PlainBill]

Thank you for your response to a noob...to go into a bit more detail, the unit switches off a couple of minutes after the "almost there" screen (the green power light goes off and will not respond to the remote). Should also mention that I was in the process of upgrading from a 40 gb drive to a 160 gb...using MFSLive. Both the original drive and the upgrade spin when powered on and continue after the unit shuts down. I suppose I should test the drives by placing them in a "good" box, which I may be able to access, but I'd sure welcome any other hints or suggestions about which direction I should take from here...I'd hate to give up on this unit if it's repairable.

The serial console output or the kernel log (found in the log directory of partition 9 should have information on the error it is encountering. Troubleshooting problems like this by the 'shotgun approach' is a waste of time.

PlainBill

[Strfish7]

I had a feeling that post would come up; wasn't sure if it was still current. I'll try that next. Thanks for the advice.

[Strfish7]

..........

[Narf54321]

I had a similar issue with a new drive and an rather large swap partition. I couldn't get the mkswap on MFSLive CD to format 768MB swap in a way which Tivo liked. Produced a somewhat similar issue: Booted up, got to "Almost there" and then after awhile rebooted. Over and over.

I restored my drive image (again) and left the swap space blank. Then I hacked the drive and put in a test.conf file to forcibly format swap using Tivo's own mkswap.
I found out through serial console that Tivo's own mips mkswap will only format swap to 512MB, so I assume that's the limit for a Tivo.

Anyway, a somewhat long story to get to the point: Something likely isn't quite right on your system partitions.