Back to TiVo Hacking
I have been a devoted follow of TiVo since getting DirecTV service in 2000. The DirecTV-TiVo combo units have served us well for six years now. In the early days, I really enjoyed hacking the TiVo boxes. We have two Series 1 boxes and one Series 2 box. I haven't touched the Series 2 box, but the Series 1 boxes have two upgraded drives and one of them has a network card that was a gateway to all sorts of fun hacking.
Well, I haven't touched the boxes in a few years ... just lazy I guess. Our main receiver started acting up a couple of weeks ago, though, which I took as a sign to get back into the game!
It looked like one of the hard drives was going bad, so I went out and picked up two cheap quiet 120GB IDE drives from Best Buy, which happened to be having a deal on them ($50 each ... not bad at all). I didn't want to lose our recordings, so I went to the tried-and-true Hinsdale guide and went with "Upgrade Configuration #5", which involves putting all four drives in a PC carcass and running the magic command:
mfsbackup -Tao - /dev/hda /dev/hdb | mfsrestore -s 127 -xzpi - /dev/hdc /dev/hdd
Well, after about 20 hours there were some bad sectors on /dev/hdb that screwed the pooch. Time for Plan B: do a dd_rescue from the fried drive to a new drive. So, I switched around how the drives were mounted and gave this command a try:
dd_rescue -B 1b -b 2M -A -v -l /var/dd_rescue.log /dev/hda /dev/hdc
After about 36 hours, it finished. I have since had the drives running in the TiVo for over a week and everything seems to work. As an added bonus, the new drives are much quieter.
So now I'm thinking I'm going to soup up the unhacked Series 2 box. I think I might go the easy way out and just do The Zipper, rather than gather all the hacks myself. I picked up a 300GB Maxtor drive for $90 that should serve nicely. At least until we make the jump to HD -- we're planning on doing that next summer.