Help! Did i fry my TiVo?

[Crash331]

I am using an old series 2 TiVo, had it since 2003. The other day I accidentally bent my USB wifi adapter and I have to take it apart and solder the USB connections back on. I didn't notice that one of the leads I soldered was touching the metal case for the radio and when I plugged it into TiVo, I heard lots of HDD seeks and the box froze up. I restarted it and all seemed fine, until I started watching all my shows and they were all just cartoon network recordings.

Looks like my serial cable is no longer changing the channel on the comcast box. Everything else seems to work fine (Now playing, etc.). I have not tried the IR blaster yet because I really don't want to.

Is there some way to hook the serial cable to a PC and see if the TiVo is sending out a signal? Is it possible I fried the serial control with this faulty USB wifi adapter? Can you replace the box on the board that has the serial and IR port on it?

[Crash331]

Please help, someone. Can I hook up the serial connector to my laptop running linux and see the output somehow?

[greg_burns]

Is this a lifetime tivo? If not, junk it and transfer your service to a new one.

You can even pick up an old S2 from ebay probably for next to nothing.

Just saying.

[cleverdevil]

There are tons of reports flowing in from people over the last week or so that Comcast is disabling the serial port on all of their cable boxes. It happened to me, and I had a tech confirm it for me in person (in fact, I witnessed the signal come into the box and disable a working serial port with my own two eyes).

I don't think your soldering has anything to do with the problems. You need to call Comcast and yell at them and complain about the serial port issue, and switch to IR blasters (ugh) in the meantime. Look around the forum and the forums.tivo.com site for more on the issue.