Configuring a TiVo drive using USB external drive caddy / IDE adaptor?

[davidshack]

Hi.

I have Cachecard and Turbonet TiVos: occasionally the network connection ceases to work (I guess because \var\hack has been lost).

Used to be I'd pull the drive, put it in a desktop PC (disconnecting the PC's hard drives so there was no risk of accidently booting into Windows), run a Linux CD and sort it out. Now I tend just to have laptops. I could get/keep an old PC just for TiVo hacks, but hope there is today a better way.

MFSLIVE.ORG site suggests you can use a USB2 to IDE adaptor to configure some drives. How about a USB external drive caddy? May I ask people's experience on either of these options? Do they work OK or are there pitfalls - perhaps in the Linux CDs we use (or the laptop bios) not seeing / dealing with the drive correctly, or in Windows writing to the drive if accidentally invoked? I have all single drive TiVo configurations, 400Gb Samsungs.

Incidentally, any thoughts on the relative reliability / stability of cachecard versus turbonet card? I'm guessing Turbonet has less to go wrong with it, hardware and drivers. Networked TiVos are great when they work but a pain to pull and fix when they cease to!

Thanks
David

[blindlemon]

Loss of /var/hack shouldn't cause you to lose network connectivity as the drivers are not installed in /var. However, sometimes it does seem to cause this problem so there's obviously something else going on somewhere!

It is possible to use a USB caddy to configure a drive, but this doesn't work with the SiliconDust NIC CD AFAIK.

What you could possibly do would be to keep a spare copy of your rc.sysinit and rc.net files somewhere on the root partition - eg. in /etc/rc.d - and then manually restore them after mounting the root (/dev/sda4 when using a USB device) from the LBA48 Boot CD (http://www.tivoheaven.com/ptv-mfstools2-large-disk.iso) started in byteswapped mode. AFAIK the turbonet/cachecard driver file (ax88796.o or turbonet2.o) should still be present in /lib/modules, but you could make a copy of that too if you're paranoid.

[davidshack]

Thanks for that. I appreciate it.

May I ask? (I get lost on linux somewhat - I usually use the network just to get guide data as I have no phone landlines). I assume I could do this initial "backing-up" of the configuration settings onto the drive of a TiVo with a working network connection without pulling the drive (from anywhere, by telnet / ftp / TiVoweb from a Windows Vista/2000 laptop?)

I'm probably wrong as to what files I've lost: but having lost connection and having only the laptop, can't tell yet. (On booting this Turbonet TiVo I no longer see the "welcome, powering up". First message I get is the "almost there" one. This TiVo must have restarted at the weekend as 30 second skip had to be reset).

David

[davidshack]

Having opened the TiVo up I see the green light on the turbonet card is not lit constantly (as I guess it should be); just flashing steadily.
Have tried the usual (reseating the card, changing cables, rebooting everything).

Searching the forums doesn't seem to find an explanation for the flashing light: anyone any thoughts please?

Thanks
David