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Need an image? Don't PM me. :)

662K views 4K replies 1K participants last post by  Larsenv 
#1 ·
If you need to reimage a TiVo for hard drive repair or storage upgrade:

Turn-key solutions are available from a sponsor of this forum, DVRUpgrade

If you want to go the do-it-yourself route, here is your best bet: drop by #tivo on EFnet. Check the topic for instructions, or just ask for what you are looking for. Be patient. If someone has it, they'll respond, eventually.

Please also use this thread to post requests for any images I can't point you to.

The old thread can be read here.
 
#250 ·
#251 ·
Are you saying that sony image will work?
I found a drive I had with a DVR740 image and put it in the Tivo and ran through the delete everything and restart and got it working. It has 6.2 on it. Its an 80gb drive.
I tried using winfms and saved the image but the new 16gb hard drive I wanted to put it on comes up as drive 0 and crashes the program. Tomorrow I will try the hinsdale boot cd. Been a long time since I did one that way. I will have to d/l a new version.
Do you know the latest software version? Does it have network enabled?
thanks
 
#252 ·
Are you saying that sony image will work?
I found a drive I had with a DVR740 image and put it in the Tivo and ran through the delete everything and restart and got it working. It has 6.2 on it. Its an 80gb drive.
I tried using winfms and saved the image but the new 16gb hard drive I wanted to put it on comes up as drive 0 and crashes the program. Tomorrow I will try the hinsdale boot cd. Been a long time since I did one that way. I will have to d/l a new version.
Do you know the latest software version? Does it have network enabled?
thanks
I think you may have mistaken my reply to GoalieEd for a reply to you.

My apoogies for any confusion I may have inadvertently caused.

Regret that I am unable to offer any help or device specific advice for a DVR740.

On a different topic, if anyone who sees this can help me get a TCD649080 Image, I'd be most appreciative.
 
#257 ·
you have pm
Thanks! Sadly, this box appears to have still more issues.

It actually keeps rebooting right from the welcome screen, rather than hanging there OR getting to "just a few more" and just the same with three different drives - the original, a dd copy of the original, and an instantcake clean build. MFS was unable to make a backup from the original, so there's almost certainly a problem there, but still it is probably time to just retire the box.
 
#258 ·
Thanks! Sadly, this box appears to have still more issues.

It actually keeps rebooting right from the welcome screen, rather than hanging there OR getting to "just a few more" and just the same with three different drives - the original, a dd copy of the original, and an instantcake clean build. Probably time to retire the box.
I don't know if you can get a peek at the boot process via the serial port with a Series 2 the way you can with a Series 1. If so, that would tell you if it's even finding a hard drive.

Test the TiVo's IDE cable on a computer and try some other cables, both 40 and 80 conductor, in the TiVo before you declare it non-working.

Apparently IDE cables, *especially* the 80 conductor kind, want to be installed once and never disturbed, and don't respond well to a lot of handling, leading to infuriating intermittents. Sometimes you'll see a hard drive show up on the BIOS/CMOS screen with one or more incorrect characters in the name/number.
 
#259 ·
Hmmm, thanks for the suggestion. With a drive jumpered to slave, and a cable borrowed from my PC, I now have the "option" of having it hang at the welcome screen, rather than cycling from there. It's different, but I'm not sure if it's helpful. When jumpered to master, it behaves the same as with the stock cable and cable select jumper. I think I can guess how "cable select" works now.
 
#260 ·
Hmmm, thanks for the suggestion. With a drive jumpered to slave, and a cable borrowed from my PC, I now have the "option" of having it hang at the welcome screen, rather than cycling from there. It's different, but I'm not sure if it's helpful. When jumpered to master, it behaves the same as with the stock cable and cable select jumper. I think I can guess how "cable select" works now.
On the old 40 conductor cables, where all 3 plugs were electrically and physically identical, pin 28 was connected at the motherboard end and at the middle connector, where the master drive was connected, and, if jumpered for cable select, the master detected that completed circuit (to ground) on pin 28, and declared itself as master.

On the far side of the middle connector a hole was punched through the wire in the pin 28 position so that the drive at the far end of the cable couldn't detect anything on that pin, and, if jumpered cable select, it detects that it's not detecting, and declares itself the slave.

The problem with this is that if only a master was installed there was an unterminated stub of cable, which reflects signal back from its empty end, which served as a form of interference.

If your 40 conductor cable didn't have that hole punched in it you had to jumper the drives differently to make one declare itself master and the other declare itself slave, but you could put either on either connector, or even plug the middle connector into the motherboard and put the drives on the two ends. If you only had one drive you put it on the end and left the middle unconnected, which properly terminated the cable.

The newer, more aggravating, 80 conductor cables feature 40 pin connectors, but each of the three has a unique internal wiring scheme.

The plug on the far end (the black one) is intended to always be the master and the one in the middle (the grayish or beige-ish one) to always be the slave, and the one on the other end farthest from the middle one is always the motherboard connector. The motherboard connector is blue, or, in some cases, green.

Pin 34 in the motherboard connector is internally connected to ground, which signals the motherboard that an 80 conductor cable is in use. The corresponding wire does not connect to that pin in the motherboard connector.

That wire is connected to pin 34 of the slave and master plugs, and the 2 drives talk to each other over it.

The motherboard and master plugs (on each end of the cable) have pin 28 (cable select) connected to the corresponding wire, so that the master detects that the motherboard socket has that pin grounded and knows that it's the master.

The middle plug does not connect pin 28 to the corresponding wire, so the slave drive connected to it doesn't detect a ground on that pin and knows that it's the slave.

Sometimes you can use an 80 conductor cable with one drive jumpered as master (instead of cable select) and connected to the black plug, and the other drive jumpered (or un-jumpered in some cases) as slave and connected to the middle grey plug, and get away with it, and sometimes it just confuses the computer and/or the drives. Depends on the particular hardware involved.

As someone once said "Standards are wonderful things, that's why there're so many of them."

As best I can tell, the welcome screen is on the TiVo motherboard, and the "just a few more minutes" screen is on the drive from which it tries to boot, so if you get the second screen it's having at least limited success in reading the drive.

It would be useful if you could telnet in to the boot process and see what the TiVo has to say.

Don't give up until you've tried with an older 40 conductor cable as well as an 80. You might have a 40 hanging off of your CD drive.
 
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