Cachecard installation

Can't get better than this:

http://www.steveconrad.co.uk/tivo/cachecard.html

Now come back cursing and swearing when your scraping your knuckles trying to get the bugger to fit...................i hope you haven't got big hands

 

not to hijack the thread, but it didn't seem worth creating another one.

I will be getting my cachecard in the next week or so. I was wondering if its ok to install the drivers on the hard drive now then put it all back together and use the tivo. Then just pop the cachecard in when I get it.

Or do you have to do the cachecard straight after the hard drive modifications?

 

It's fine to put the drivers on now. When you boot up you'll get a Silcon Dust splash screen which will load the drivers, whinge because there's no cachecard, then load the TiVo normally.

Make sure you haven't set it to download over the cachecard - otherwise you won't be able to download guide data via your modem.

 

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Thank you for the fast reply.

 

These may help on the software hacks add ons once you have the Cachecard installed and working.

http://tivo.lightn.org/

www.ljay.org.uk/tivoweb/

www.beaconhill.plus.com/TiVo/tivohacks.htm

www.arielbusiness.pwp.blueyonder.co.uk/freeranger/TiVo/HowTo.htm

http://alt.org/wiki/index.php/TiVoWeb Modules

http://thomson.tivo.googlepages.com

http://tivo.stevejenkins.com/network_cd.html

http://thomson.tivo.googlepages.com/tivowebplus

http://widgets.yahoo.com/gallery/?search=oztivo&x=0&y=0

www.tivohackman.com

www.weethet.nl/english/tivo_extract_videos.php

www.deal data base.com/forum (note the spaces between deal, data and base don't exist in the actual URL)

 

I hadn't come across the penultimate link before - thanks

Some day I may post my TiVo2iPod and TiVo2PSP scripts on the last link - bit worried about softies laughing at my risible coding though - works for me anyway and I can keep up to date with all things Ambridge

 

Some of the websites are more useful than others but you need to trawl through them to decide which ones. It gets called hacking because its all left down to you the user to pick out what you want to use and of course there are no guarantees any of it will work or any official technical support lines (although there is a pretty good unofficial support line in this forum called blindlemon who also does a lot of the professional Tivo upgrade kits that some people buy).

Blindlemon is probably the only forum member here who knows the definitive answer on the memory question. It definitely can't be faster memory than 133 but not sure about slower.

Or you could also ask the question to the makers of the Cachecard at www.silicondust.com/forum/index.php

 

The RAM should work fine.

The TiVo CPU only runs at 56mhz, so even PC100 RAM is way faster than required.

 

It must be the season for Tivo upgrades. I just put a new 250Gb hard disc in yesterday, but I'm still waiting for the cachecard to turn up.

Like you, I thought I might as well install the drivers while I had the disc out, but for some reason nic_install said the new disc wasn't a valid Tivo drive. I put the disc in and it booted fine, so I'll have another go at figuring out why it was complaining once the card has arrived (I've found a couple of suggestions so far: disabling the drive in the bios, or perhaps the driver for the linux boot disc I used wasn't byte-swapping).

A couple of points I noted while upgrading: I'm pretty sure I had checked the serial number as indicating a two drive system, but when I finally opened it up it was a single drive so I copied the recordings across which took about 1.5 hours. Maybe I just misread the number.

All the upgrade guides say the Tivo drive is set to 'master', but in fact mine was set to 'cable select' (as was my cdrom, and the new drive). Unfortunately I didn't realise what 'cable select' actually means until I read the description on the new drive otherwise I could have saved myself a lot of messing around with jumpers.

 

Cheapest compatible memory with the Cachecard ( as regularly supplied by TivoHeaven (blindlemon) to his Cachecard customers) is this £30 DIMM from Ebuyer:-

http://www.ebuyer.com/customer/prod...m9kdWN0X292ZXJ2aWV3&product_uid=22918&_LOC=UK

Of course down in Spain international carriage will add to your costs so it may be cheaper to find a Spanish website supplier.

Alternatively if you have a PC 133 168pin 128MB or especially 256MB DIMM blindlemon maintains that these give a large part of the benefits seen with a 512MB DIMM.

 

I have used that RAM, and I have also used RAM from other sources

Just get the cheapest PC100 or PC133 module you can find. I missed that your previous module was a Registered module (which are not supported) - sorry

 

I have finally managed to get a backup of my tivo drive (didn't realise it HAD to be fat32 originally).

I am now having problems with the actual driver install. Everything goes ok until I get to the actual transfer. I type in ./nic_install cachecard (and tried just nic_install cachecard). But it just reads for a while and returns "Bus Error". I have tried 3 different floppy disks.

One problem I may be having is that all the files from the driver download wont fit on the floppy as they too big. So I only have what I can on the floppy:

On floppy:

burstd
cachecard.o
cachectl
libpthread.so.0
nic_config_tivo
nic_install
nic_install_tivo
ping

There rest wont fit.

"nic_install_pc_20050218" is the file I have download from silicon. Any help appriciated.

 

anyone any idea why I am getting "bus error" on the floppy disk/drive?

I am thinking that maybe I should burn the files to another cd and use them from there.

Once I have used the boot cd, is it ok to pull it out and put a cd with the drivers in and install like that? Or does the computer use the boot cd during the installation/straight after?

If I am able to use a cd whats the linux command for the cd-rom drive? its on the secondary slave (e.g. HDA, HDB, FD0, etc.)

 

According to the silicondust faq the mfstools cd doesn't enable byte swapping properly. Try booting from one of the silicondust cd images: that should also help with the floppy size limits.

My Cachecard and DIMM both arrived today, so now I just have to find a quiet period for the Tivo to try this for myself.

 

i'm using the Silicondust boot disk and the floppy disk problem is just that once the files are extracted they come to 1.57mb in size.

 

tried with the cdrom drive, didnt work. Anyone know why the driver download is too big to fit on a floppy disk?

 

Because you can usually boot a machine with a CD-Rom these days.