greg hughes - dot net

Security, IT and anything else that matters... to me, that is

Saturday, September 24, 2005 12:46:54 PM (Pacific Daylight Time, UTC-07:00) ( Geek Out | Random Stuff | Tech )

Hacked_sticker A long, long time ago, I ripped apart my Series 1 TiVo PVR and put in a couple 120GB hard drives. In the end I got an obscenely huge number of hours of recording time, plus I added an ethernet card so a phone line's not needed to get programming info, and then I did some other fun "hacking."

Anyhow, I woke up this morning and found out my trusty modified TiVo was misbehaving badly. Or maybe it's just sick - It had a choppy image and sound on both live TV and recordings, even on the menu systems you can hear the drive inside moving between glitchy animation pauses on the screen, and it's exhibiting generally sluggish, choppy behavior. So, I figured I'd sacrifice everything on it (it's practically full - maybe another cause of the problem, who knows?) and I did a delete and reset through the TiVo's menu system.

That was at about 7am. The system restarted and the screen read, "Clearing and deleting everything. This will take an hour." It's after 2pm now and the screen hasn't changed. Seem like either the system assumed it has a 20GB hard drive in it still, or the hard drive(s) are having problems. But, it sounds like it's still methodically plugging away, so I'll let it go for a while longer and just see what happens.

Anyone else been through this? Any ideas? I've had this TiVo since they first came out, and it's served me well, but I'm also thinking maybe it's time to pick up a Series 2 TiVo and open it up and do some more PVR hacking.

Add/Read: Comments [3]

Geek Out | Random Stuff | Tech

Bookmark with:

Delicious

Digg

Facebook

StumbleUpon

Referred by:
dotnet pc slow (www.google.co.uk) [Referral]

Sunday, September 25, 2005 1:03:44 PM (Pacific Daylight Time, UTC-07:00)

It's almost certainly your harddrive(s).

If you still have an image of your orginal "A" drive, you should be able to take out the drives, determine if either are still any good, and go buy another drive...then image one of them as the "A" drive and pretty much start from scratch as if it was a brand new series 1 TiVo.

If you don't have your original "A" drive image stored somewhere, you might be able to find someone to give you a copy.

Or...just go buy a new Series 2 :)

Bryan Batchelder

Sunday, September 25, 2005 1:12:22 PM (Pacific Daylight Time, UTC-07:00)

Hmm, just my luck. CompUSA had a special on Series 2 DVRs til yesterday, was effectively free after rebate. Maybe it's time to dump DishNetwork (yuck) and go to DirecTV. TiVo built in to a Satellite is oh so good sounding. I wonder what their HD version sells for nowadays...

Greg

Monday, September 26, 2005 8:18:22 AM (Pacific Daylight Time, UTC-07:00)

Yeah I did all that hacking on a series 2 unit. I had added bigger HD, the webserver (for remote access) the hacks to view shows on the PC, but now, the Tivo does almost all of that out of the box. So my new unit is going to live hack free. I have the burner (got it from Tivo rewards for referring 7 people).

I'm convinced my poking around in there was what blew up my old series 2.

John Batdorf

Comments are closed.