TiVo Community Forums Archives - Played fast and loose and got what I deserved

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Played fast and loose and got what I deserved
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Posted by: TiVoBji

Hey all. I have an unfortunate dead TiVo sob story to tell.

I ordered a TurboNet card and it came today. Excitedly I got to work on installing it and TiVoWEB.

Installation of the card was painless and in a matter of minutes I had the TiVo connected to my home network and making "phone calls" via the net. Cool.

My next task was to install the telnet daemon and rudimentary TiVo networking tools so that I could get to work on getting TiVoWEB up and running.

I started to become discouraged when all of the instructions I read made continual references to downloading floppy images and booting from floppy disks to copy the networking tools to the TCD. What is this "floppy" they speak of?!?!? My computer has no floppy drive - I haven't had one in years, seeing as how I haven't actually needed one in a looong time.

OK I thought, why not just go the easy route? I'll simply pop the TiVo A drive (I have a two-drive TiVo, with a B drive that I blessed and used to expand the TiVo a couple of years ago) into my Linux computer, and copy the files onto it directly. No problem!

My next snag came when I found that try as hard as I might, I could NOT get the TiVo A drive out because one of the screws is so tight that it just *will not come out*. After some bruised fingers and cursing, I finally hit upon a simple idea - why not just leave the drive in, and use the TiVo chassis to power it, but disconnect its IDE cable and connect it directly to my PC? It ended up looking like some weird TiVo-computer hybrid, with the TiVo chassis plugged into the wall and powering up off of the same power strip as the PC, but with its IDE connection for drive A coming from the PC.

OK boot the PC, the TiVo drives spin up (notice I said drive*s*, I'll get to this later), the BIOS recognizes the disk, I log into Linux and - what's this - no partition table on the TiVo drive? I started reading up on this particular issue and learned that I needed to boot with an MFStools disk in order to unlock the drive and allow me to work on it.

OK, a little more research and I found that there are bootable CD images which include the MFS tools so I made one, and made a CD image of the software that I wanted to put on the TiVo, and rebooted my computer from this CD image.

Viola! The TiVo drive was recognized, and I was able to mount partitions 4, 7, and 9, and *carefully* install my new software. Great!

Shut down the computer, reconnected the TiVo drive to the TiVo IDE cable, booted the TiVo and ...

Uh oh ...

The dreaded reboot cycle. It won't get past the initial TiVo logo screen; the drives sound like they are doing something for about 15 seconds, then the screen flashes purple, then black, and the TiVo logo comes back on the screen. Repeats this boot cycle over and over ...

So I pulled the TiVo drive back out, put it back in my computer, booted from the tools CD, and reverted all of my changes.

Still, the same problem.

I've tried about 20 different things, but the upshot is, there is no reviving this TiVo. It's gone. I wonder what did it?

Was it:

* The fact that I left the B drive in the chassis AND PLUGGED INTO THE TIVO IDE CABLE while I powered the TiVo up and worked on the A drive (which was connected via IDE to my computer)?

* The fact that the TiVo booted and stayed booted with just one secondary drive connected, several times?

* Something I did to the partition table on the A drive when I booted straight into Linux with the drive attached to my computer?

* Something I did to the software on the A drive (I think this is least likely because I really was careful when modifying the software on the drive)?

Note that I never made a backup. Whoops. Dumb, I know, but after the ease of installing the turbonet card I just got a little too confident.

I did do a backup (the kind which "divorces" the drive A image from drive B as it backs up) after all of this, hoping that a backup in this way and a restore would at least allow me to boot my TiVo using just the A drive, and re-marry my B drive later, losing all of my recordings but getting a working TiVo out of the deal. No dice.

Well, like I said, it's dead.

Does anyone have any suggestions?

The really funny thing is ... I *work* for TiVo. I should have known better :) On the other hand, I have access to equipment at the TiVo offices which will allow me to rebuild this TiVo without too much difficulty to a factory-fresh install. The problem is, I am currently away from the office, working remotely for a few weeks. So unless I can fix this problem using just software, I'm gonna be watching TV without a TiVo for a while ... and we all know how much *that* can suck ...

Any words of condolance or advice would be most welcome.

Best wishes everyone!
Bryan

Posted by: JJBliss

Try reseating the little white parlax ribbon cable near the front of the machine.

Posted by: Robert S

Sticking at the first splash screen is a little non-specific. It means that the TiVo was unable to start the Linux boot script. This puts suspicion on the A drive or the TiVo itself.

My guess would be that you've damaged /etc/rc.d/rc.sysinit either by making an invalid alteration to the text or by removing the executable flag.

Posted by: TiVoBji

quote:
Originally posted by Robert S
Sticking at the first splash screen is a little non-specific. It means that the TiVo was unable to start the Linux boot script. This puts suspicion on the A drive or the TiVo itself.

My guess would be that you've damaged /etc/rc.d/rc.sysinit either by making an invalid alteration to the text or by removing the executable flag.

Thank you very much for the suggestion, I will check it out ...

Bryan

Posted by: TiVoBji

Well, I've given up. Thanks for the advice though guys.

After playing around with the rc.sysinit file on the A drive, I was able to determine that there are a couple of problems.

First, the setserial program seems to be missing from the drive. I don't know *how* this could have happened. This was causing it to report "Essential diagnostic file missing" and reboot. This is only after I commented out the kickstart stuff, which seemed to be rebooting continually also.

I was able to see on the /var partition that the last real logs it generated, around the time of my first boot after messing with the TiVo, was about the Essential Diagnostic Files missing. MIght have something to do with the fact that I forgot to unmount the partitions before I rebooted my PC the first time I edited the TiVo drive to add the network software.

At any rate, it's totally hosed and I'm giving up on it until I get an image that I can use to rebuild it.

Thanks again guys, and best wishes!

Posted by: Robert S

The system partitions are all the same, so you don't necessarily have to blow away your recordings, just copy the system partition from a working drive.