If you are installing two new drives into your TiVo, the slave drive should be in the position closer to the fan and the
master drive should be at the edge of the bracket. In either case, be sure to orient the drive so that the connectors are opposite the fan cable. Next, secure the whole apparatus down.
The easiest way to attach a drive to the bracket is to turn the bracket upside-down. Using one hand, hold the drive against the bottom of the bracket and look through the holes in the drive bay to align the screw holes. Using your other hand, screw the screws into each of the four holes. Use a screwdriver to tighten the screws.
If you are installing two hard drives, you are going to need to replace the IDE ribbon cable and add a Y-power adapter to your TiVo. Remove the existing IDE cable by pulling it up and out. Replace it with the new cable, taking care to align the grooves in the cable with the notch in the connector. As for the power cable, just hook up the two ends to the hard drive, but don't connect it to TiVo power yet.
Wire up the drives with the IDE cable. Remember, if you are putting in two drives, the master should be on the far end of the cable with the slave hanging off the middle.
Slide the bracket to the edge of the TiVo lid and insert the end of the IDE cable into the TiVo motherboard. Be careful to insert the cable properly. There is a groove in the blue connector that must align with the notch in the motherboard connector. Now, attach the drive power connector (the red, yellow, and black cable) from the TiVo into the power connector coming out of the drives.
Once the cables are connected, carefully flip the drive bracket over and install it into the TiVo. The drive bracket will move fairly freely inside the TiVo, and you will have to be careful to align the four holes in the TiVo with the four holes on the drive bracket. Be sure that the IDE and power cables are in front of the two drives; they should not be under the drives as you turn the bracket over.
Once the four holes are aligned and the drive bracket is installed, again make sure that the IDE and power cables are tucked under the front lip of the TiVo. It is critical that all of these cables are tucked underneath the gold and silver tabs on the lip of the TiVo, lest they get pinched. With your screwdriver, reattach the four black screws in the holes on the drive bay.
Remember to reattach the fan at this point, or your TiVo is going to get mighty hot inside.
Slide the lid on and seal her up.
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Hack 28 Testing Your TiVo's New Capacity
Wondering if your new hard drives work? Let's find out.
After all that hard work and time looking at the guts of your TiVo, now it's time to find out if all that hard work paid off.
Reconnect your TiVo and plug it in. Watch it boot up. If it gets that far, then this is a really good sign! Surf your way to TiVo Messages & Setup System Information and check out the line that starts with "Recording Capacity."
What does it say? Mine's shown in Figure 2-7.
Figure 2-7. Plenty of hours of recording capacity
As a rule of thumb, your TiVo should, on average, hold about 1.2 hours per GB of hard drive storage in standalone models (without a built-in DirecTV receiver) and about 0.875 hours per GB in the DirecTV with TiVo models. If you have a total of 150 GB of storage in your standalone TiVo, you should be able to store about 180 hours of
programming at basic quality. In a DirecTV with TiVo, the same 150 GB will yield up to 130 hours.
If for some reason the number is not right, go over the directions with a fine-toothed comb. But if it is right, then congrats! Time to set that Season Pass to record all the soap operas that you could ever watch.
—Chapter by Michael Adberg and Jeff Shapiro, WeaKnees.com ( 2001-2003 Adberg Consulting LLC)
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Chapter 3. The TiVo Shell
Section 3.1. Hacks #29-46
Hack 29. Mounting and Working with TiVo's Drive Partitions Hack 30. Enabling Bash over the Serial Port
Hack 31. Copying Unix Binaries to TiVo Hack 32. Clean Up and Shut Down Hack 33. Connecting to TiVo Serially Hack 34. Installing Unix Binaries on TiVo Hack 35. Poking Around
Hack 36. Moving Stuff to and from Your TiVo Hack 37. Installing the less Pager on Your TiVo Hack 38. Text Editing with vi on Your TiVo Hack 39. Text Editing with Emacs on Your TiVo Hack 40. Displaying Images on Your TV
Hack 41. Putting Text on the Screen Hack 42. Capturing Closed Captioning Hack 43. Caller ID on Your TV
Hack 44. Running the Same Thing Over and Over...
Hack 45. Save Multiple Shows at a Time to Your VCR Hack 46. Playing MP3s on your TiVo
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3.1 Hacks #29-46
We stumbled over it briefly when booting up the MFS Tools [Hack #23]. We caught a glimpse of it when we shut down TiVo's software [Hack #18]. I'm speaking about the Linux operating system humming away under the hood of your TiVo. The TiVo interface you see on your television set, TiVo's responses to your remote control, and all the gray matter that makes your TiVo a TiVo are Linux applications.
Linux, Linux, everywhere, but not a drop to drink. This chapter rectifies that by dropping you into the TiVo shell, a text-only command-line environment very much what you'd find on any Unix system (or DOS prompt, if you prefer).
Here you can poke about, install software, run applications, and generally interact with TiVo from the inside out.
TiVo's default shell is called Bash, the "Bourne-Again Shell" (
http://www.gnu.org/software/bash/bash.html), a common variant available on just about any Unix system.
There is, however, one thing standing between you and the shell; this Linux box doesn't appear to have a keyboard.
How are you to type anything on the command line without anything to type on? No worries; we'll just have to go in another way—over the serial port.
Those of you with Series 2 machines are a little out of luck. Unlike its original Series 1 counterpart, the Series 2 has hardware encryption onboard that attempts to prevent you from running arbitrary code. The most commonly known exploit involves a hardware modification to the TiVo's motherboard, which goes well beyond the scope of this book and crosses some legality boundaries. While this chapter will focus on Series 1 software only, you're sure to see some ports to the Series 2 in the usual places online in the future.
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Hack 29 Mounting and Working with TiVo's Drive Partitions
Before you can edit any of TiVo's configuration files, turn on the Bash shell, copy across files, and so forth, you need to understand a little about TiVo's drive partitions.
If you've performed a hard drive upgrade or simply read through Chapter 2, you probably noticed that we kept to the task at hand and never really devoted any time to what was actually on TiVo's disks. You had your hands full—literally—already, now didn't you?
In order to perform any of the feats in this chapter, you'll need at least a lay of the land when it comes to your TiVo's drives. If you're used to Unix, this will probably seem rather familiar to you; nevertheless, a quick refresher never did anyone any harm.
I'm assuming that you have gained direct access to your TiVo's drives by performing the following steps:
1.
Opening your TiVo [Hack #20]
2.
Removing its drive [Hack #21]
3.
Mounting the drive in a spare PC [Hack #22]
If not, you'll need to do so before any of this hack is of any real use to you.