Newbie needs help

[studioj]

I was given a series 1 Philips 312 30Hr TIvo because it has a bad modem. I really don't want to use the thing with Tivo service... I just want to use it as a DVR. I can't tell what version of the operating system it has. When I power it up, it wants to do the "ET phone home" thing and call Tivo, which of course it can't since the modem is fried. I tried using 2 different external modems on the Tivo serial port but got no activity on the modem so that was a bust. Is there any way I can get passed the silly setup screens without fixing the modem or investing in some other way to allow the box to call Tivo? How can I tell what version of the OS the Tivo is running? These setup screens are so tedious... I'd really like to get rid of them and just use the thing to record TV programming. Any suggestions how I do that?

[NoCleverUsername]

Just plugging in a modem won't work, at least not automatically. Take a look at this External Modem How-to (http://www.tivohelp.com/archive/tivohelp.swiki.net/34.html).

[studioj]

The guy I got this from said he had not used it in years. I can't seem to figure out (and this is really frustrating) what version of the Tivo OS my box is running. It's very possible that my box is running software earlier than V3.0. What do I do in that case?

[funtoupgrade]

Chances are it has 3.0 - it has to be very very old not to. You could always get a more recent image and reimage the drive per hinsdale if worse comes to worse.