It's no secret: we love our DirecTiVo. But last week a power outage mysteriously took out one of our poor, beloved time shifting friends. After the carnage, the poor critter powered up and displayed the Green Screen of Death. In today's How-To we'll grab some junk out of the closet and rebuild our TiVo -- maybe, just maybe this could help if you too have a dead or dying TiVo in your home.
For today's How-To you'll need:
- DirecTV Series 2 TiVo (aka DirecTiVo)
- PC with CD burner, optional hard drive
- #10 and or #15 Torx screwdrivers (you can even find Torx drivers at Wal-Mart now)
The first step in restoring our dead TiVo is to acquire a backup copy of the TiVo software. TiVo isn't very fond of people who host copies of their operating system online, but it can usually be found on various file sharing sites. If that's not your bag, you can buy a CD with the system you need from a few vendors online. (Like the Instantcake CD from
PTVupgrade) In our case, we dug through our huge, freakish pile of CDs and found our original system backup. Hard drive selection is another issue. Series 2 TiVo's are less picky than their older brothers. We used a spare Western Digital 80GB drive for ours. (Which is the same as the original one in our TiVo anyway.)
To open up the TiVo, grab your Torx drivers and remove the screws from the rear. Once they're off, just slide the case back a little bit and you can lift it off. The power supply inside is exposed, so don't touch it. Even when it's unplugged, some of the capacitors can hold enough charge to hurt you (or melt a screwdriver).
Carefully unplug the power and IDE cables from the TiVo - Watch out for the white ribbon cable that connects to the front panel. You can seriously damage the TiVo if you power it up with that cable disconnected.
Remove the pair of torx screws that hold down the drive bracket. They're in between the drive and the front of the Tivo. When they're removed the drive and bracket easily lift back and away from TiVo.
Download a mfstools boot CD image from
sourceforge. Burn the image with your favorite burning software.
Crack open your work PC and disconnect the hard drive. You'll need the CD/DVD drive to boot from and restore the system. Connect your future TiVo drive to the cables you disconnected from the hard drive.
Insert your mfstools boot CD and boot the machine using it. During the boot process, you'll get a prompt. Just hit enter.
Once it's booted, we want to make sure that we know which drive is which. Type in the following commands and hit enter after each.
cat /proc/ide/hda/model cat /proc/ide/hdc/modelIf the string that's returned by the command spits out something describing your drive, you've found it. The drive is indicated by the hda or hdc. If neither looks right, try replacing hda with hdb and hdd. If hda is your drive, then it'll be /dev/hda for later on. Now, note where your CD drive is. Our TiVo hard drive is /dev/hda and our CD drive is /dev/hdc.
Eject the CD you booted from and put in the disk with the backup copy of the TiVo software. To mount the disk, run the following command. (Be sure to adjust the command if your CD drive isn't hdc.)
mkdir /mnt/cdrom mount /dev/hdc /mnt/cdrom cd /mnt/cdrom ls
The command shell should be in the directory with your TiVo system backup. The ls command should have given you the directory listing.
To restore the drive on a Series2 TiVo like ours, do this:
mfsrestore -s 127 -bzpi tivo-backup.mfs /dev/hdaYou may need to add an x to expand the backup to your drive, like this:
mfsrestore -s 127 -xbzpi tivo-backup.mfs /dev/hdaWhen you're done, shutdown the machine with the 'halt' command. (Don't worry if it says kernel panic, it's fine.) Turn the box off and unplug your TiVo drive. Install the drive on the bracket and put your TiVo back together.
TiVo lives! Now that you're not afraid of opening it up and you're interested in hacking your TiVo, go check out the
dealdatabase forums. It takes a while to trudge through all the information there, but you can add some pretty sweet features to your TiVo with a little bit of work. But we'll save that for another week's How-To. Enjoy!
posted August 15th 2006 2:39PM
Personally, I'd like to know how to get the USB ports on the back of a DirecTivo running so I can get the Linksys 802.11b wireless adapter working.
>Watch out for the white ribbon cable that
>connects to the front panel. You can
>seriously damage the TiVo if you power it up
>with that cable disconnected.
It's way worse than that. If the cable is EVEN SLIGHTLY dislodged or askance (even just from a nudge), it will burn out the infrared receiver on the TiVo. I happen to have learned this the hard way. Fortunately, it can be fixed with some careful soldering.
In other words, be damn sure that the white cable is completely and solidly plugged in before turning on the power.
USB ports on a Series2 DirecTV unit? That's easy; we have a product, called PTVnet, for that too. You can also use the free stuff available at DealDatabase as an alternative.
As for using a wireless 801.11B, we don't support that, but I think it can be done. As an alternative, consider using a USB 2.0 Ethernet adapter along with bridge or wireless gaming adapater. That will achieve the same result.
Definitely check out http://tivo.upgrade-instructions.com! I just found this site last night and it's pretty incredible. Not that you couldn't get the information elsewhere, but Weeknees has been kind enough to put this together for us!!!
I have two series II Tivo's both with lifetime subscription service. I've pumped them both out to 320hrs each. They each have two disk drives and additional cooling. Bought the kits with preformatted drives from www.weaKness.com. They are inexpensive and their stuff works! I never run out of disk space anymore.
OK... I got my DirecTiVo Series 2 almost 3 years ago and hacked the unit within 2 hours of the installation tech leaving! I used the method similar to those described and it has worked flawlessly ever since with the 120 GB drive ==> 105+ hours.
Anyhow, here is my question: I am getting itchy to hack the box further (this comes and goes periodically based on how many other distractions I have - LOL). I have read many of the posts on tivo underground and dealdatabase, however I need on thing clarified.
IF I use the Zipper and other tools to available to implement some of the extra features alluded to above, do I lose the ability to connect to DirecTV and download my Tivo schedule? I have read thru much of the 230+ pages of posts and can't find a specific answer to this question. What makes me think I will lose this functionality is the repeated mention of running a cron job nightly to trick the unit into thinking it has already called or keeping the device disconnected from the phone line.
Please point me to the appropriate posts and save me from months of research!
TIA!!!
One you can do to help drain some of the capacitors is to unplug the system and then try to power it on. The device should try to power on and drain some capacitors. I know it works with computers.
Power outage killed your TiVo? For a person so technical as to pull apart a TiVo kinda weird that you haven't the smarts to invest in a UPS?
Ohohoho. I *have* a ups on my tivo.
Here's what happened:
Power outage for 1.5 hours. (ups is now flat)
Power comes back - after 20 minutes of solid power I turn things back on.
5 minutes later we have another 10 minutes of outage.
Flat ups means no help for the tivo.
When the power came back - she's dead, Jim.
What im interested in is how to revive a directivo when the satalite tuner dies? How about a HD DirectTV box? Both of these units have experienced faults where after power incidents the devices continue to work, except for recieveing channels. The Tivo that fried still worked fine, in fact we watched all the stuff that was still on the drive before i just took it out and used it in a computer. (BTW, is that a bad idea?)
Any ideas on fixing tuners would be appreciated.
Word to the wise when dealing with dealdatabase forums, DO NOT expect much help posting questions like 'I want to know how to hack my xxxx Tivo', or 'How do I do this?' A quick look at some of the threads there should illustrate my point as I spent a good deal of time over a year ago on that board to learn how to hack my Samsung DirecTivo box (at the time Series 2 boxes were still considered new and had only a basic amount of hacks available) and learned quickly that most of the pros on the boards have little to no patience when dealing with n00bs.
To Scott:
Making the hacks does not stop your ability to download schedule data as it is downloaded directly from the satellite anyway. Your best bet is to start reading the newbie forum at DDB. Here's a good link to start with your Series 2:
http://www.dealdatabase.com/forum/showthread.php?t=38468
To echo what Sean said, do not expect a lot of help there if you don't bother to read the stickies and search for your basic answers. DDB is a place where they expect you to do your own research so that you can fix your problems and learn while doing so.
Scott asked:
"IF I use the Zipper and other tools to available to implement some of the extra features alluded to above, do I lose the ability to connect to DirecTV and download my Tivo schedule?"
The channel line-up and schedule has been sent to DirecTivo units via satellite for a few years now - no phone-home needed. AFAIK the only funtionality you lose by not connecting the phone line is PPV directly through the unit - you will need to call DirecTV to purchase PPV shows.
If you really want to keep the daily call happening, just don't install the hack the hijacks the call routine.
Don't forget to add in the noZKT and noTivoTier hack! :-)
Sean said:
"Word to the wise when dealing with dealdatabase forums, DO NOT expect much help posting questions like 'I want to know how to hack my xxxx Tivo', or 'How do I do this?' A quick look at some of the threads there should illustrate my point as I spent a good deal of time over a year ago on that board to learn how to hack my Samsung DirecTivo box (at the time Series 2 boxes were still considered new and had only a basic amount of hacks available) and learned quickly that most of the pros on the boards have little to no patience when dealing with n00bs."
I think there is plenty of patience there, but the board isn't intended for those types of questions (although they've already beed asked and answered there many times before). Its not really a question of being a n00b or not, its more of an issue of using the board in the way its membership wants it to be used.
dvrplayground.com and tivocommunity.com are more tolerant to beginner-questions, however keep in mind that the sticky threads in each forum should be reviewed prior to creating new threads - it will help keep the clutter down.
And it should be noted that this is *not* covered by warranty. YMMV
I did the Zipper last weekend on my DTIVO. I wanted to upgrade from 4.x to 6.2 to get HMO and MRV. This was an EASY upgrade using an image from PTV and their LBA48 aware boot disk. I used a 320Gig WD drive and am running Tivoserver on a workstation for still more storage. The process was easy, MFS_FTP for extractioninsertion was "a bit" harder but I got it done. YES, you still get the guide data and NO my phone line isn't being used - never has been. I do have the CallerID code on the machine thogh so I may attach one for that. TivoWEB+ is nice and I can now easily backup Season Passes and Channel selections. I've not yet been successful serving up downloaded video using Tivoserver but it serves extracted video NICELY. The AVS Forum Tivo section is good for finding out about Zipper. http://Dealdatabase.com forums are where you go to find the serious information and to find out about extraction. However those guys are quite nasty to newbs who don't want the TIVO to be their life but they *do* know everything you'd want to know about a TIVO and have probably posted it so search search search before asking!
Next to my hacked XBOX running XBMC my TIVO is one nice piece of hardware! Together there's not much I cannot do with my entertainment center and I've got an MCE HTPC too just in case but it mostly gathers dust thanks to the efforts of the other two boxes :-)
I give what are the noZKT and no TivoTier hacks? First I've heard of them and will be searchnig but am now curious...
"Don't forget to add in the noZKT and noTivoTier hack"
There is a great Zipper tutorial (step-by-step guide) on DVR Playground: http://www.dvrplayground.com/article/13683/
I have a Hughes DirecTivo that has started to reboot itself every day at 1:40pm. Directv has replaced it with 'their' model of DVR. The old one still has a good remote, Hard drive?, and may be fixable. It is for sale, but don't know what it's worth. Email me, first come and all that.
We no longer have Direct Tv- however can I remove the hard drive from my Direct tivo and burn the shows to dvd? Or maybe connect it to my xbox for a media center?