TiVo Community Forums Archives - Why hacked units will work...

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Why hacked units will work...
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Posted by: EricC

I have been reading in the forums that some people think that Tivo might want to screw up all the hacked units we have so bravely upgraded. Here is why I think this will not happen.

Lets say Tivo sends out some evil signal and my new 91 hour unit stops working. Easy enough, I wait for Replay TV to upgraded there software for manual record (which they will do). and I pick a nice new large HD unit. Sure it will cost some more money but the no monthly fee and the unvoided warrenty will be good enough for me.

But then you say I have a Tivo just sitting there doing nothing. Wrong, I have a $100 15GB Quantam HD that I can slap in a computer that I use for rendering 3D or something.

Sure I lose out on the better TIvo interface but tivo loses my 9.95 a month and I most likely would not return.

Actually I think Tivo is the greatest thing since sliced bread (which I actually rarely eat) and I have not had this amount of tech fun since I was building my 286 PC way back when.

Later,

Eric C

Posted by: DBCooper

quote:
Originally posted by EricC:
But then you say I have a Tivo just sitting there doing nothing. Wrong, I have a $100 15GB Quantum HD that I can slap in a computer that I use for rendering 3D or something.

Hmmm, small technicality here. Ever heard of locked drives? You may or may not have an easily reusable primary drive.

Posted by: pv

The locked drive thing is no big deal. In the best case, the "factory" password will take you to a function that will let you unlock the drive for good.

In the worst case (if "factory doesn't work), you'll need to do a simple, if slightly scary, process (documented in the FAQ) of swithing the drive over to your PC *after* tivo starts up. Once you have write access to the drive, you can bootstrap yourself back to the best case by 1) adding "export shondss=true" to rc.sysinit, 2) putting the drive back into tivo and rebooting, and 3) on the new shell, entering "crypto -u -srp factory" to set the backdoor password. Once you do all that, one more reboot lets you unlock the drive, and you can from there do whatever you want with it.

It's a bit of work, but drives from dead tivos are totally reusable. PV