Glitchy video

Hi all,

I suspect that my HDD might be about to die .. which is not the end of the world, since they're cheap enough these days, and there's not a lot recorded that I couldn't live without if needs be.

The symptoms are that the playback on my TiVo starts to glitch periodically - I get pixellation, and stuttering in the playback .. it "sticks" or pauses for anywhere from a second to a few seconds and then starts off again. Seems to be getting more frequent too. From what I can tell, this glitching is not always actually present on the recording .. often if I rewind, I can get it to play back without glitching at the same point - although often it will still glitch in the same place.

I've read the various threads on the other Oztivo lists etc, and the consensus seems to be that this is likely the signs of a failing HDD??

Just thought - before I go and get another HDD and image it - I'd post a note in here to see if anyone has had similar symptoms, and whether there is anything else (bad ram etc) that I should check first?

I did see a post about someone experiencing similar symptoms replacing their IDE cable with some success - although I really can't see why/how a cable should suddenly start to degrade all of a sudden?? Sounds more like what a failing HDD would do - like it's "retrying" reads or something? Can't hear any clicking from the HDD or anything audibly wrong though.

The current HDD I'm using is a Seagate 160Gb. I've installed dailymail, and enabled the SMART integration, but the drive doesn't seem to support much in the way of SMART features (like self-test etc), so that doesn't really tell me much about the actual status of the drive ... except that it's there (and I kind of figured that out for myself!!). Before anyone asks - the glitches happened well before the dailymail install. And prior to that I'd made absolutely no changes for ages.

So the questions are:
1) Is there anything else I should check/look out for that might be causing this?

2) If I have to replace the drive are there any recommendations? This one's about 18mths to 2 yrs old, so past its warranty but not _that_ long in terms of HDD life these days I would have thought .. which makes me a little leery of getting another Seagate!! And does anyone have a recommended supplier?

3) Has anyone had any luck removing the drive and using low-level tools (like the Seagate tools) to check and reformat drive before re-using? I'd hate to go through all of that and find the disc is cactus and I end up having to replace it anyway, but on the other hand if it's just a matter of some bad sectors that need flagging, perhaps I can save myself the cost of a new HDD?

Any suggestions?

Cheers

Mark

Quote:

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Originally Posted by NZMarke

2) If I have to replace the drive are there any recommendations? This one's about 18mths to 2 yrs old, so past its warranty but not _that_ long in terms of HDD life these days I would have thought .. which makes me a little leery of getting another Seagate!! And does anyone have a recommended supplier?

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Seagates use to have a three year warrantee, and increased that a while ago to five years. So you may wish to check with your supplier or a local Seagate distributor to see what the story is.

To copy a Tivo image from one drive to another boot the OZ Tivo image and exit to a prompt and use:

Code:

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mfsbackup -l 32 -6so - /dev/hda | mfsrestore -s 127 -xzpi - /dev/hdb

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This will not transfer any recordings, but you could try and run the mfsbackup command without the "-l 32" if you do wish to maintain those recordings.

If you just want to check the disk, you can put it in a PC and boot from the cd from http://www.ultimatebootcd.com/

It has the Seagate Manufacturer's utility ( and lot of others)
It will tell you if your disk is bad. A lot more reliable than SMART.

I use it all the time.

Or you could just download the Seagate util itself:
http://www.seagate.com/support/seatools/

Quote:

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Originally Posted by thomson

Seagates use to have a three year warrantee, and increased that a while ago to five years. So you may wish to check with your supplier or a local Seagate distributor to see what the story is.

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Thanks - I'll check that out. I'm not sure I can remember where I sourced it from though! Still perhaps I can send it straight back to the disty? I was looking on one of the online shops at HDD's the other day, and they listed the warranty on Seagates as only 12 months. But that could well be incorrect of course? I don't remember the actual site ... one I got to from Pricespy I think.

Quote:

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Originally Posted by thomson

To copy a Tivo image from one drive to another boot the OZ Tivo image and exit to a prompt and use:

Code:

---

mfsbackup -l 32 -6so - /dev/hda | mfsrestore -s 127 -xzpi - /dev/hdb

---

This will not transfer any recordings, but you could try and run the mfsbackup command without the "-l 32" if you do wish to maintain those recordings.

---

Thanks for that. I think I might re-image afresh, since I'm not running the most recent OzTivo image. Also, when I set up initially, I left the standard swapfile set .. which I understand is really too small for a 160Gb drive? One posting I read suggested that everything would operate OK unless the Tivo went into self-check mode, in which case the utils it runs won't complete with a disk that large and the standard swapfile setting? Or did I misunderstand?

Thanks again for the help/advice! Much appreciated.

Cheers

Mark

Happiness would be ONE working Tivo! ;-)

Quote:

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Originally Posted by Wibble

If you just want to check the disk, you can put it in a PC and boot from the cd from http://www.ultimatebootcd.com/

It has the Seagate Manufacturer's utility ( and lot of others)
It will tell you if your disk is bad. A lot more reliable than SMART.

I use it all the time.

Or you could just download the Seagate util itself:
http://www.seagate.com/support/seatools/

---

I've got the Utility off the Seagate site already, but that Ultimatebootcd site sounds useful/interesting anyway, so I'll definitely check it out. Thanks heaps for the tip!

Cheers

Mark

Quote:

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Originally Posted by NZMarke

Also, when I set up initially, I left the standard swapfile set .. which I understand is really too small for a 160Gb drive?

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Incorrect. 127MB swapfile is fine for up to 274GB total storage as per the online instructions for setting up a TiVo:

http://minnie.tuhs.org/twiki/bin/vie...repareTiVoDisk

"Image - use this option to select and restore the image file to the disk. The default (127MB) swap partition size is OK for total disk storage of up to 274GB. Above that, the rule of thumb is to divide the disk capacity (in GB) by 2 and to use that many megabytes (for example use 300MB for a 600GB TiVo). "

To add more swapfile to a drive that does not require it can actually cause problems.

Quote:

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Originally Posted by Darren King

Incorrect. 127MB swapfile is fine for up to 274GB total storage as per the online instructions for setting up a TiVo:

http://minnie.tuhs.org/twiki/bin/vie...repareTiVoDisk

"Image - use this option to select and restore the image file to the disk. The default (127MB) swap partition size is OK for total disk storage of up to 274GB. Above that, the rule of thumb is to divide the disk capacity (in GB) by 2 and to use that many megabytes (for example use 300MB for a 600GB TiVo). "

To add more swapfile to a drive that does not require it can actually cause problems.

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For future reference, for anyone else who might be experiencing similar problems with their TiVo, I replaced the HDD with a 250Gb Seagate, and have not experienced any further glitching of the video. The setup was extremely smooth - my thanks for all the documentation and hard work on the setup routines!!

For interest's sake, I ran a series of diagnostics on the old drive and nothing was reported as amiss with it. Strange. Too nervous to add it back into the TiVo though - in case it was an intermittent fault that resurfaces later.

So if you are getting these sorts of symptoms, it could be that your HDD is faulty - even if a scan of it doesn't report any faults.

Now just got to get the endpad loading up correctly - getting an error when it tries to load .. and as a consequence the beginnings of my recordings are being missed!

Don't suppose anyone has any suggestions about the following?

Tuesday 01:30:37 : Attempting to recover
Tuesday 01:31:08 :
Tuesday 01:31:08 : Rise and shine!
Tuesday 01:31:08 : Error detected
can't scan path (errNmNameNotFound)

while executing
"mfs scan "/Recording/Active" -start "3:""
("uplevel" body line 2)
invoked from within
"uplevel $body"
invoked from within
"transaction {uplevel $body}"
(procedure "RetryTransaction" line 5)
invoked from within
"RetryTransaction {
set currecs [mfs scan "/Recording/Active" -start "3:"]
}"
Tuesday 01:31:08 : Attempting to recover
Tuesday 01:31:08 : Too many errors, stopping

Cheers all,

Mark

Hi All,

Did a bit of tinkering. Adjusted the settings for endpadplus in rc.sysinit.author. The default was:

/hack/bin/endpadplus.tcl 5 15 -auto

I changed this to:

/hack/bin/endpadplus.tcl 3 10 -auto

and rebooted. Now everything appears to work OK and endpadplus is starting correctly according to the log file in /var/logs/endpad.log:

Monday 11:17:02 : EndPadPlus 1.1.2 starting up
Monday 11:17:02 : Software version: 3.0-01-1-000
Monday 11:17:02 : Number of tuners: 1
Monday 11:17:02 : Time Zone offset: 0 hours
Monday 11:17:02 : Daylight Savings: off
Monday 11:17:02 : Start padding set to 180 seconds
Monday 11:17:02 : End padding set to 600 seconds
Monday 11:17:02 : Suggestion equalization is off
Monday 11:17:02 : Verbose logging is on
Monday 11:17:02 :
Monday 11:17:02 : Rise and shine!
Monday 11:17:03 : Processing current recording(s):
Monday 11:17:03 : * No recordings in progress
Monday 11:17:03 : Processing next recording(s):
Monday 11:17:03 : * Trading Up In The Sun on [8 Living] from 20:30 to 21:00 (Sug
gestion)
Monday 11:17:03 : Not time to add start padding yet
Monday 11:17:03 : Next end padding setting due 20:55
Monday 11:17:03 : Next start padding setting due 20:25
Monday 11:17:03 : Next wake up will be 11:47
Monday 11:17:03 : Back to sleep...
Monday 11:17:03 : Checking every minute for kill signal.........

Not sure why that worked, but it appears that it did! Odd,

Mark

That change shouldn't have made any difference, but endpadplus will have all sorts of weird errors until you have set some season passes and has indexed and the todo list has a few programs on it, usually about 24 hours after re-imaging it will come right by itself.

Most newbies don't notice this, only people who know what it should be doing notice the errors at first.

Peter.