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Other entries in Chiswick

Setting up the TurboNet Card

Right, so a few months have passed since I first opened my TiVo. I have been a bit lapse in this hacking, but a few days ago I got the motivation I required. Joe Richards gave me so much shit the night before at the pub that I got up first thing in the morning and was installing the drivers by 8:30am.

So this is what I had to do to get it working:

1. Turn off the TiVo. I put it into standby and then waited until the hard drive was not making any more noise, then unplugged the machine.

2. Open up the box... see the previous entry.

3. Work out which drive was what. Well, I have a two drive Thompson Scenium TiVo (UK edition). The drive at the end of the chain was the A drive and the B drive was the one in the middle. Out of interest my A drive is 30GB and the B drive is 15 GB. Which gives me 45GB total that is about 40 mins of recording at the lowest level.

4. Pull out the A drive. I cannot stress enough, be careful, the power supply will still have charge in it and the drive is right next to exposed circuit board. You have been warned. You may have to take your drive out several times.. don't get lax. So you only need the A drive as it contains the pirmary and secondary copies of the operating system, a /var partition and some MFS (media file system) space for storing your progs.

5. Plug the drive into a PC. Personally I put mine on my secondary IDE chain in my PC, unplugged the other drives except for my CD-ROM drive on my primary chain. NB: make sure you get the jumper setting correct, the TiVO wants the drive to be a master. [if you don't understand what that means, stop right now and put your drive back inside your TiVo].

6. Boot-up off the TiVo installation CD-ROM. It will go and unlock the drive. I had marginal success with this and had to re-boot several times for it to work properly. Also, the CD-ROM 'swap' options wouldn't boot on my PC. Odd. Anyway, it will boot and unlock the drive and put you into a # prompt.

7. Re-boot the PC with Dylans Boot Disk in the A floppy drive.

8. Log-in as root and mount the file systems.

# mkdir /m4
# mkdir /m7
# mkdir /m9
# mount /dev/hdc4 /m4
# mount /dev/hdc7 /m7
# mount /dev/hdc9 /m9

Slice 4 and 7 are supposed to be identical copies of the root partition and is type ext2. Slice 9 is /var. When the TiVo is operating it mounts the active root partition read only. However, the /var partition is mounted read+write. Sooooo we will put the stuff we might want to change into /var and stuff that is not likely to change into the root partitions.

9. Put a disk with the network drivers in the floppy drive and mount it.

# mkdir /floppy
# mount /dev/fd0 /floppy

10. Copy the files you need into the correct place. You need to have the following directories.

You should put /tivo-bin into /m4/tivo-bin. And /hack into /m4/var/hack

11. Setup the network modules. You need to put the module for your network card into /lib/modules/. In the case of the TurboNet card you need ax88796.o. I made the mistake of putting the wrong mondule in the first time. Thanks Joe for noticing that it wasn't an ne2000 chip on the TurboNet card :-).

12. Add some routes and ifconfigs into the startup script. There was an installer on the net somewhere from silicontech or something or rather. It doesn't work. Because... two reasons. 1, it creates a rc.net script for /etc/rc.d/ that doesn't get called. 2, The module creates a warning because it was not compiled for the correct version of the OS and their script checks for the module loading without any problem... the result it loads the module but doesn't do the ifconfig and the route. The solution, do it by hand.

Add the following to the end of /m4/etc/rc.d/rc.sysinit

syslog -t Stats "Starting up the network services"
tnlited 23 /bin/bash -login &
/sbin/insmod -f /lib/modules/ax88796.o macaddr=69C667 timing=3
/sbin/ifconfig eth0 192.168.2.3 netmask 255.255.255.0 up
/sbin/route.tivo add default gw 192.168.2.254

Hmmm, also you will not that the route command has been renamed to route.tivo. The installers do this so they can check to see if the install script has already been run on this box. So go into /m4/sbin and cp route to route.tivo.

Then reboot :-)

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