TiVo Community Forums Archives - I messed up rc.sysinit. Help!

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I messed up rc.sysinit. Help!
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Posted by: rlb330

I have a series 1 Tivo that I added a 2nd drive to and installed Tivoweb. I was trying to add the line that autolaunches Tivoweb to the rc.sysinit file and I hosed the file.

I edited it with Textpad which I read was ok, but I didn't chmod it to executable when I put the file back on the Tivo. When I tried to reboot the Tivo, it hangs on the black welcome screen.

I pulled the drives, hooked them up to my computer and booted with the unix boot disk I got from here: tivo.stevejenkins.com

I'm not sure what I need to do now. I don't know if I killed the rc.sysinit file by editing it with Textpad or by forgetting to chmod it to executable. I don't know my way around unix commands at all, so if someone could tell me step by step what I need to do, I'd greatly appreciate it.

Posted by: wscannell

You can try making the rc.sysinit executable by mouting the partition, going to the directory where you put it and entering

chmod 755 rc.sysinit

The other problem that you may have is that some windows text editors add different carriage control between lines. If this is the case, you probably should start with the original rc.sysinit and use an editor on one of the boot disks such as Dylan's.

Posted by: Robert S

If you FTP'd it back to the TiVo in ASCII mode, the FTP process would have corrected the line termination codes for you.

Posted by: rlb330

I booted with Dylan's boot disk and mounted the floppy drive and hdc4 (hdc7 and hdc9 wouldn't mount). I can cd to hdc4, but when I try to cd to etc it says that it can't.

I tried to chmod from the root using the directory structure, but it didn't know what chmod was. What do I need to do now?

I have a full backup that I can restore if all else fails, but I'd rather not lose all of my recordings if I don't have to.

Thanks for the replies.

Posted by: rlb330

Does anyone know why I can't cd into the etc directory?

Posted by: Robert S

I would guess you're using the wrong path.

Posted by: rlb330

I don't think I'm using the wrong path. I can see that I'm in the directory that has etc in it. I type cd etc and it says that it can't. Could it be anything else?

Posted by: Robert S

You're not really giving us much to go on. What does the output of 'mount' look like? (Just the line that refers to the TiVo partition).

Can you cd around other partitions in the RAM disk?

'ls -l' will list all files with some info about what they are. Directories are marked by a 'd' at the start of the line (normal files have a '-' there).

Posted by: rlb330

Well, I think it just became a moot point. I was booting up the computer to find out the exact wording of the error I was getting and my original Tivo A drive started making a terrible noise. After a couple of minutes, a screen came up telling me that there was a hard drive failure. I'm just going to buy a new drive and restore my backup to that. Thanks for trying to help anyway.