There are three TiVo units in our house. All of them have hardware and software modifications. Some of the modifications include:

Hardware

1. Larger harddrives
2. Network cards
3. Extra cooling fans

Software

1. Telnet
2. FTP
3. TiVoWeb
4. Caller Id
5. noscramble

The noscrabmle modification (mod) caused the most heartache. When installed, it allows programs recorded by the TiVo to be extracted and viewed on your computer or burned to a DVD. Because the RIAA generally frowns upon redistribution of pristine digital copies of copywrited works, the folks at TiVo came up with a scrambling algorithm to discourage extraction. What the didn't count on though, is the wherewithall of some hacker and his need to extract and burn dvds of his favorite porn, movie, tv show, or cartoon.

Once the noscramble patch or kernel modification is in place, programs can be recorded in an unscrambled (i.e., extractable) format. However, since the TiVo automatically updates itself with the latest version of the operating system, periodically the TiVo will be set back to the scrambling mode.

This has the added bonus of not allowing you to watch any of the shows that were recorded using noscramble mode. And, because of this, Jake watched errors instead of The Wiggles.

The errors occur because the TiVo has no idea the shows were recorded in unscrambled format and therefore, when it tries to play an unscrambled program using its playback algorithm it freaks out, displays error messages and pisses off your child.

The remedy

To fix the TiVos I began by removing the harddrive from the unit. Once the drive was removed, I attached it to the secondary IDE chain in the master position (hdc) of an old PC. I then used the network card install disk from silicondust.com to boot the machine.

Hold on. Let me back up a step here and explain how the TiVo software updates work...

From what I can gather, when the unit makes its daily call back to TiVo HQ, it relays the software version. If a newer version is available, your machine is flagged for an update and it will download it the next time it makes its daily call. The update will be placed on the inactive partition of the drive.

The TiVo drive has many partitions but I'm only going to talk about a few--namely, 4, 7 and 9. Partitions 4 and 7 are used for these updates. One of the partitions is set to active and therefore is the boot partition. The way TiVo handles the update is to download the new version to the inactive of the two partitions (in my case 7) and then switch the active flag to set the partition with the new version as the active(boot) partition. Then reboot.

So, in most cases, after an update, all of your changes like startup scripts and .profile files can be found on the inactive partition of the two.

There is another partition that is important too though...9. Partition 9's mount point is /var which means it is the /var directory. And, since the TiVo updates usually don't, and in this case did not, affect that partition, all of the mods I installed in the /var/hack directory were still there.

Back to the story...

I followed the instruction from http://tivo.stevejenkins.com/network.html starting with step 2.7.2 (skipping the floppy mount) to mount the partitions. Once they were mounted I copied a few files from the inactive partition (hdc4 or /mnt4) to the same locations on the newly active partition (hdc7 or /mnt7). I only needed /mnt4/.profile and /mnt4/etc/rc.d/rc.sysinit.author. All of my bash shell settings were stored in the .profile file and all of my startup directives were stored in the rc.sysinit.author file.

Next I followed the network card installation instructions on the software installation page (http://www.silicondust.com/turbonet/install_software.html). I then set the IP address manually to its previous setting and I was done.

I remounted the drive in the TiVo unit and powered it back up. Everything was back in working order and The Wiggles were back on the air.