hacks gone - so has FTP/telnet! which were elsewhere

After a restart last night (i told the Tivo to restart through the thumbs down routine) I appear to have lost all my LAN access to the Tivo, normally I would put this down as a zapped hacks directory. however ALL network access to the Tivo has failed, no tivoweb, but more oddly no ftp/telnet/ping. It was all working immediately before the restart.

On the offchance, i plugged in the modem cable to the phoneline (i had been using internet for access) and a test call worked.

My question is, if the hacks dir has gone I was not expecting to see the modem connection work straight away. Does this point to the turbonet card having gone for a burton? the mundane var/hacks dir gone, or the more irritating "your hard drive is dying" scenario?

On a more far fetched note, I guess it is not possible the nic_config is mangled (too much to hope for I guess)

Tivo still seems to work OK, and as I write this it is happily doing a daily call with the modem. I have ordered a serial cable in the hope I dont have to open my Tivo up (lack of easily accesssible PC's to put the drive in)

John R