TiVo Community Forums Archives - why oh why do the computer gods hate me?

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why oh why do the computer gods hate me?
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Posted by: adamyork

Ack.

I've been trying to upgrade my TiVo all weekend, but my computer won't let me. Every time it looks like I'm making progress, some totally unrelated computer issue bites me and I have to deal with it rather than continuing work on my TiVo. I've reinstalled windows twice this weekend and dealt with what appears to be data corruption on my main working drive -- what a pain!

So I give up and go to put my TiVo back in some semblance of working order for the week. It boots and all the recordings are there and everything is peachy. I go ahead and tell it to make the daily call, since it hasn't in several days. OH NO! The dreaded no dial tone message! Is it possible that I fried the modem while working inside my TiVo? Could repeated plugging/unplugging of the power cable have caused some sort of surge that disabled the notoriously fragile modem? I guess it's also possible that there was some static damage or something, but I took the same precautions with TiVo that I always take with computer equipment -- I thought I was pretty careful.

Arrrgh.

My question is, if my modem is in fact fried, am I screwed? I actually bought the extended warranty on this unit, having lost two previous ones to dead modems. Will Circuit City repair/replace it even though I've broken the seal on the case? If warranty repair is out of the question, what are my options?

I'm already getting the shakes now that I'm faced with the prospect of a couple of weeks without my beloved TiVo. I guess I knew the risks going in, but it doesn't make it suck any less.

Darn.

-Adam

Posted by: sjf

Trust me, I'm really NOT trying to be an a$$hole, but with all your messing around, you DID remember to plug in the phone line, right? http://www.avsforum.com/ubb/biggrin.gif

ElectricLegs seems to have the modem repair stuff pretty well scoped out. Contact him if your modem is really fried.

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<FONT size="1">A second was defined in 1967 as "the duration of 9,192,631,770 periods of the radiation corresponding to the transition between the two hyperfine levels of the ground state of the Cesium-133 atom."</FONT s>

Posted by: ElectricLegs

If the sticker looks ugly remove it all the way and remove the glue with brake cleaner and try to swap it. I doubt moving the drives around fried the modem. Try changing the dialup number and removing the *70 if you're using it. Try pulse dialing too.

Posted by: kdmorse

I'll add a silly question of my own. If you are perhaps a DSL user, did you remember to put the microfilter on the line you have your TiVo plugged into? I mention it only because I had a similar problem - after hacking the TiVo it would work fine in my computer room, but not in the living room (no dial tone). I nearly ripped the wiring in the walls apart looking for the problem, before I realized I had forgotten to put a filter in the TV room...

-Ken

Posted by: adamyork

Just out of curiosity, how difficult is it to get updates working over PPP/Serial for a Linux newbie? I don't mind poking around a BASH prompt or editing config scripts, but I haven't done much work under Linux. Also, my routing box runs Win2k. Does this preclude me from using it to make my daily calls over a cable modem?

To answer the questions, yes I plugged in the phone line, I don't have DSL, I tried with dial tone detection on and off and I power-cycled the unit to see if that would help. So far it looks grim in modemland.

Thanks again,
-Adam

Posted by: slowwit

Adam,

This is another grasp-at-straws from a way non- expert, so take with a grain of whatever...

I've had 2 "no-dial tone" messages that were not helped by power cycling, but which were solved by unplugging for at least half an hour. Apologies if this is what you did.

It's almost the status of an urban myth that removing power for a long time can possibly be different from just rebooting, but at least in my case, with Tivo modems it is.

Sure hope this or something helps you out.

sw

Posted by: adamyork

I'll try leaving it powered off for a little longer this evening -- maybe it needs some extra time to get the bad mojo out of the system http://www.avsforum.com/ubb/tongue.gif.

On an unrelated note, I found the TiVo boot CD to be immensely useful in my non-TiVo related computer woes this weekend. The ability to do an exact, byte-for-byte copy of an entire hard drive proved useful in troubleshooting my drive-corruption problems. Much easier, in fact, than digging out the old copy of Ghost I have lying around.

Thanks again to all who make these things possible.

-Adam

Posted by: sonnik

I've also seen where a "make test call" resets it.

It's almost as though something in the script "hangs up" prior to calling whereas the "daily call" does not.

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-sonnik
PVRHack.sonnik.com

Posted by: adamyork

Well, I'm becoming more and more sure that the modem is toast. Before I attempt to return the TiVo, I'd like to explore all avenues available to me. I think I would like to try getting PPP over the serial port working, since I have a cable modem.

I'm wondering if anyone here who has done this can give me some measure of how difficult it is. I don't need a howto or anything (I'm as capable of searching the forums as the next person) -- I'm just curious where this falls on the scale of difficulty for TiVo hacks.

Thanks again,
-Adam

Posted by: Saturn

Setting up PPP is fairly easy, especially considering all of the FAQs out there. There are at least four, one covering linux, one covering Win2k (not a FAQ, but a thread), one covering BSD (also covers reliability, setting up the TiVo so the connection restarts itself, applicable to any situation), one for Win98, and I had a post in the Win2k thread that showed the modifications necessary to get it working on NT.

I'd say that once you get shell access to your box with a text editor, you should be able to get PPP running in a couple hours (probably less). It took me about 8, but that's only because I was the first (from what I could find) to get some sort of authentication working, which is required with NT, it can't be completely disabled like it can on Linux and Win2k. Bwiley took that info and got it to work on Win98, essentially the same procedure, but obviously the settings/dialog boxes on the 98 side are different than RAS for NT. The big time consumer is the switching back and forth between running a shell on the dss port and enabling PPP, you can't have both at the same time, and switching between them generally requires a reboot. I suppose you could setup a script (while loop) to switch between them during the initial setup (troubleshooting) phase, but I didn't think of that at the time.