Complete and utter defeat...
For the past few week's I've been trying to fix up Lee's old TiVo. It was stuck on the "Powering Up" screen, and the hard drive made a terrible clicking noise. Tonight I've finally decided to concede defeat after spending hours and hours googling, reading hundreds of community postings, and trying a variety of different configurations. I have taken my desktop apart, created five boot CDs along the way, and made numerous trips to Radio Shack and MicroCenter.
I first thought I would succeed when I found an image for my TiVo model. I downloaded it and loaded it up onto my new hard drive. Plugged it into the TiVo and it booted up successfully. Unfortunately, TiVo setup requires a landline. I went upstairs and tried it on our neighbor's phone line, but no luck. The internal modem was broken.
The default TiVo image for this particular machine runs an old version of the TiVo software that doesn't support making update calls by connecting various devices to the serial port (more on this later). Restating the problem: My TiVo needed software update. The only supported way of getting the software update was via the modem. The modem was completely broken.
TiVo has a protection mechanism to guard against system changes; this can be disabled by a utility called killhdinitrd, but killhdinitrd only works on more recent versions of the software. killhdinitrd is now considered the best way to hack TiVo, but it replaced an older, buggier hack, called monte. I decided to give monte a try, knowing that I could always revert to the clean image of the TiVo.
monte lifted my hopes. It installed a new version of the system software. I connected via the TiVo's serial port with a null modem adapter from Radio Shack. I watched the TiVo's boot log scroll by on my laptop screen. I was sure that PPP over Serial would do the trick now that it had been enabled by monte. Basically this involves hooking up the TiVo's serial port to your computer and letting the TiVo use the network connection to get updates over the internet. I thought I came very close to getting this working, but in the end my computer was never able to understand the "~" character generated by the TiVo, despite numerous attempts to update my modem drivers.
My last hope was connecting an external modem to the serial port. And it seemed so promising as I heard the TiVo dialing the phone number and connecting - but it all came crashing down with the sound of the modem disconnecting. I tweaked and read and tweaked more, but no luck there.
And with that, I've decided to give up. I'm sending the drive in to http://www.weaknees.com/ so that they can put a more recent image onto it. Then I can just plug in a USB-ethernet adapter into the back of the TiVo and have everything work.
...
The TiVo Community is incredibly responsive, vibrant, and helpful. The experts on the forums are extremely patient and thoughtful. http://www.tivocommunity.com/ and http://www.dealdatabase.com/forum/ are two incredibly rich resources, and there are tons of other how-to pages.
Gotta love the Internet. Also gotta love StanSimmons and cactus46 on TivoCommunity.
...
I'm sure that my poor wife is wondering why I've spent all of these hours mucking around with a silly old piece of hardware when I could be doing other things like taking our Nintendogs for a walk or cleaning our condo.
I was hoping for a more triumphant end to this story - this morning (despite having my hopes dashed twice already) I thought I could have the TiVo working in time to record The OC and Reunion, since Jen was going to miss them.
There's something very engaging and fun about tinkering on your own. One of the guys on the message boards said something to the effect of, "Every new error message you get is a cause for celebration" - and it's completely true. I savored every little bit of progress along the way because I worked so damn hard for it.
It's a shame things didn't turn out better. Fingers crossed for the new image.
I first thought I would succeed when I found an image for my TiVo model. I downloaded it and loaded it up onto my new hard drive. Plugged it into the TiVo and it booted up successfully. Unfortunately, TiVo setup requires a landline. I went upstairs and tried it on our neighbor's phone line, but no luck. The internal modem was broken.
The default TiVo image for this particular machine runs an old version of the TiVo software that doesn't support making update calls by connecting various devices to the serial port (more on this later). Restating the problem: My TiVo needed software update. The only supported way of getting the software update was via the modem. The modem was completely broken.
TiVo has a protection mechanism to guard against system changes; this can be disabled by a utility called killhdinitrd, but killhdinitrd only works on more recent versions of the software. killhdinitrd is now considered the best way to hack TiVo, but it replaced an older, buggier hack, called monte. I decided to give monte a try, knowing that I could always revert to the clean image of the TiVo.
monte lifted my hopes. It installed a new version of the system software. I connected via the TiVo's serial port with a null modem adapter from Radio Shack. I watched the TiVo's boot log scroll by on my laptop screen. I was sure that PPP over Serial would do the trick now that it had been enabled by monte. Basically this involves hooking up the TiVo's serial port to your computer and letting the TiVo use the network connection to get updates over the internet. I thought I came very close to getting this working, but in the end my computer was never able to understand the "~" character generated by the TiVo, despite numerous attempts to update my modem drivers.
My last hope was connecting an external modem to the serial port. And it seemed so promising as I heard the TiVo dialing the phone number and connecting - but it all came crashing down with the sound of the modem disconnecting. I tweaked and read and tweaked more, but no luck there.
And with that, I've decided to give up. I'm sending the drive in to http://www.weaknees.com/ so that they can put a more recent image onto it. Then I can just plug in a USB-ethernet adapter into the back of the TiVo and have everything work.
...
The TiVo Community is incredibly responsive, vibrant, and helpful. The experts on the forums are extremely patient and thoughtful. http://www.tivocommunity.com/ and http://www.dealdatabase.com/forum/ are two incredibly rich resources, and there are tons of other how-to pages.
Gotta love the Internet. Also gotta love StanSimmons and cactus46 on TivoCommunity.
...
I'm sure that my poor wife is wondering why I've spent all of these hours mucking around with a silly old piece of hardware when I could be doing other things like taking our Nintendogs for a walk or cleaning our condo.
I was hoping for a more triumphant end to this story - this morning (despite having my hopes dashed twice already) I thought I could have the TiVo working in time to record The OC and Reunion, since Jen was going to miss them.
There's something very engaging and fun about tinkering on your own. One of the guys on the message boards said something to the effect of, "Every new error message you get is a cause for celebration" - and it's completely true. I savored every little bit of progress along the way because I worked so damn hard for it.
It's a shame things didn't turn out better. Fingers crossed for the new image.