Hacking your DirecTivo http://www.ideaspace.net/users/wkearney/archives/entries/000544.html Success! I've managed to get my RCA DVR39 DirecTivo to recognize and use the Linksys USB ethernet connection! Doing this... wkearney 2003-12-06T10:32:43-05:00 http://www.ideaspace.net/users/wkearney/archives/entries/000544.html en-us Success! I've managed to get my RCA DVR39 DirecTivo to recognize and use the Linksys USB ethernet connection! Doing this... 2003-12-06T10:32:43-05:00 Success! I've managed to get my RCA DVR39 DirecTivo to recognize and use the Linksys USB ethernet connection!

Doing this was quite a bit less than trivial. Made worse by the terrible documentation listed in various forums. I'll try to summarize the steps.

]]> Success! I've managed to get my RCA DVR39 DirecTivo to recognize and use the Linksys USB ethernet connection! Doing this... Basically the trick likes in using an older version of the Tivo operating system to pull a "boot then reboot" sort of two-step dance. The hack is referred to as 'doing a monte' as a play on the 'three card monte' game. The Tivo's all come with two boot and kernel partitions. This to allow it to download an upgrade and get it installed but still give you a fallback position in the event something goes wrong with the upgrade. This 'monte' hack makes use of this feature as a way to get around the restrictions the OS puts on doing things 'the normal way'.

What's damned irritating about the instructions is their failure to document what differences can exist and how to work around them. I could be cynical and just say it's because they've been too lazy to document it properly. But hey, at least they tried and without their efforts it wouldn't have been possible for me to piece together the right steps.

First, it helps to do this on a brand new drive. The time it takes to backup and restore partitions takes forever. If you use a new drive you can at least put the original one back in place and resume using the device normally. This helps when the other folks in the house don't quite grasp why they hell you're f'ing around with the brand new device.

Anyway, the process boils down to these simple steps:

  1. Put a drive in a PC on the secondary IDE as a master device.
  2. Boot from a Tivo hacking CD
  3. Restore the image of an older version of the OS into the drive
  4. Pull the drive from the PC and put it back in the Tivo
  5. Boot the Tivo on this partition and make sure it works
  6. Put the drive back in the PC
  7. Restore some other images to certain paritions on the drive
  8. Put the drive back in the Tivo
  9. Run the 'Clear and delete everything' function on the Tivo
  10. Connect a serial cable from a PC to the Tivo
  11. Use a terminal program to connect to the Tivo
  12. Use the terminal program to edit some text files on the Tivo
  13. Upload some files to the Tivo
  14. Execute some commands on the Tivo to see if it recognizes your USB ethernet device
  15. Add some commands to a text file to enable the USB ethernet by default
  16. Reboot the Tivo
  17. Reconnect to the Tivo using the serial terminal, telnet or FTP
  18. Upload some more files and configure some more text files
  19. You're done

That sounds simple enough, right? Well, it's pretty damned time consuming to do this. And, as I mentioned, most of the existing docs don't make it as clear as one might like. Hopefully my explanations can help clear it up a bit. I'll be breaking them down, step by step, here and in future messages. Stay tuned.

Meanwhile, get yourself a copy of a Tivo boot CD. Yes, there are ways to make a boot floppy. Unfortunately most of them suck. It's just way too tedious screwing around with switching floppies.

Then make sure you've got a PC setup to handle having the Tivo drives connected to it. Make sure the PC's got a bunch of free space on a FAT32 formatted C: drive (first partition). I took an old Gateway and put an old 8gb drive in it. I formatted the drive as all DOS. I then made sure it's BIOS settings were setup to boot from CD first. You'll need this partition and it's free space to allow you to hold various files and backups of your Tivo.

DO NOT SKIP MAKING BACKUPS OF YOUR TIVO. If in the event anything goes wrong you can always reload from the original backup and use your Tivo as it shipped from the factory. Do not go without making yourself a backup, you WILL regret it if you don't.

I'm out of time at the moment. I'll post my step-by-steps later this week.

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