Newbie needs help in Auckland

[BruceC]

Hi all,

I must be the newest newbie in NZ.

I got my TiVo from George on Monday and have had very little success.

I have got the Oz image onto my drive but then I get "Error - Unable to access mfs." message when trying to install the cachecard software off floppy.

Then, when I attempted to start over again I thought I would format the drive in PC but the 160Gb Maxtor is only being seen as 9.8Mb !

I thought the drive had died, so I got myself a new 120Gb Maxtor and have had exactly the same sequence of results.

I tried running the nic_install that is on the Oz Image CD but no matter what master/slave primary/secondary combination I use it never finds a TiVo hard drive.

And yes, I did follow the instructions to boot the TiVo to the Guided setup before running the cachecard software.

At this point - and the fact that my linux knowledge is as extensive as my knowledge of brain surgery (eg: none) I am looking for a linux experienced TiVo guru in Auckland who might come and assist a newbie and be compenstated with amber fluid or equal valued products :-)

Cheers
Bruce (in Albany, North Shore)
bmc/bruce@clear.net.nz

[thomson]

160Gb Maxtor is only being seen as 9.8Mb !

Seems that the drive has been booted in a TiVo... and it looks like the TiVo has decided to "lock" it. I have not seen this happen with Seagate's or Samsung's, and running the unlock (qunlock.exe) utility on a Maxtor is a little risky.

[thomson]

Reports are that qunlock will sometimes work on a Maxtor as long as the drive had been locked by the TiVo... however, if it is run on a drive that has not been locked, then many people have reported that the drive permanently locks and can not be reset!

The following is a link to the diskutil utility, which is a little safer to use than the qunlock utility as it checks to see that the drive was locked before doing its stuff: http://www.tivocommunity.com/tivo-vb/showthread.php?s=&threadid=148629

Like I previously said... it's risky unlocking a Maxtor, but if you wish to try then the diskutil is probably the best application for you. I have no experience with Maxtor but have used it on Quantum drives.

[jaidev]

Seems that the drive has been booted in a TiVo... and it looks like the TiVo has decided to "lock" it. I have not seen this happen with Seagate's or Samsung's, and running the unlock (qunlock.exe) utility on a Maxtor is a little risky.

True, DON'T run qunlock unless you want a doorstop.. run Diskutil.exe instead, it is completely safe, copy it onto a bootable DOS disk.
http://tivo.upgrade-instructions.com/diskutil.zip

EDIT: heh bet me by a minute!! Anyway I have run Diskutil Numerous times on my dual 300gb maxtor drives, works fine.

[BruceC]

Thanks guys.

I will have a crack with DiskUtil in the morning. PC and TiVo is at work.

I assume I use the "DiskUtil/PermUnlock DriveNo." option.

Hopefully that puts me on the road to TiVo joy.

Bruce

[thomson]

Yes... you should be able to use the info option to list the attached drives.


A:\DiskUtil.exe /Info


And then using the PermUnlock option to unlock the drive. This should unlock the drive, but will need to be performed again if you ever pull the drive out of your TiVo again, as it is very likely that the TiVo will lock the drive as soon as it is booted.



A:\DiskUtil.exe /PermUnlock DriveNo

[BruceC]

Thanks guys. All worked great afterusing the DiskUtil app.

Was pleased to know I hadn't been killing drives!

So then I had It all set up. EXCEPT

My clock on TiVo was out by 5 hours (eg: at 3:30pm my TiVo thinks it's 10:30am).

I had run the settime command and the settime -rtc and rebooted, but for some reason it only came right after I pulled the plug on the power.

I would be interested in experienced comments as to why the 4-8 hour part of the setup only took about 30min (using Full Jetstream) but all the data is there for the EPG. If from now to 16th Nov is ALL. Being new I'm not sure how far out it goes.

Cheers,
Bruce

[thomson]

I had run the settime command and the settime -rtc and rebooted, but for some reason it only came right after I pulled the plug on the power.
This seems unusual... if you wish to play with dates then I have a couple of posts on the subject. One is an
rdate(1) (http://www.forums.oztivo.net/showpost.php?p=2295&postcount=24) implementation, and the other relates to Daylight Davings Time (http://www.forums.oztivo.net/showpost.php?p=2184&postcount=4)


I would be interested in experienced comments as to why the 4-8 hour part of the setup only took about 30min

The amount of time required for the database import and index is directly related to the amount of information (which, of course, is related to the number of channels and the number of days involved). A slice that has been striped to only contain Free To Air (FTA) data loads in less than two minutes. The 4-8 hours related to the US cable networks which have a large number of channels each with more than two weeks of data.

It is normal to only have a few (4) days future guide data in the database as the broadcasters to not provide easy access to future data.

[zollymonsta]

Isn't there another thing that has to be done, set the timezone to option '7' (GMT)?

[thomson]

Isn't there another thing that has to be done, set the timezone to option '7' (GMT)?

Correct... done via the "timezoneadj30.tcl" script... which should be in the /hack/bin directory on an OZTivo image. If you have a look using the MFS module via the TivoWeb interface then you will find the current settings in "/State/LocationConfig".
[FYI: These can be found in "/Setup" for a UK (v2.5.5) system]

[BruceC]

Anyone know if there is a code to get the TV remote volume to control the PACE sky digital box volume control?

And my last question (for today!) - Is it normal that you can't get into the recorder/phone setup ? - I think I read somewhere that you can only get in there when it is in NTSC mode. Is there anything in there I need to adjust or setup after it is all going? - I know I can force a daily call via TiVoWeb.

Ok, my very last question now .... What NAT port do I use on my router to allow me to access my TiVo (at home) from my browser (at work) - that's assuming woosh can give me a static ip address for home first !

Cheers for helping out a newbie. I had my first TiVo experience last night and it rocked.

Bruce

[ehintz]

Anyone know if there is a code to get the TV remote volume to control the PACE sky digital box volume control?

And my last question (for today!) - Is it normal that you can't get into the recorder/phone setup ? - I think I read somewhere that you can only get in there when it is in NTSC mode. Is there anything in there I need to adjust or setup after it is all going? - I know I can force a daily call via TiVoWeb.

Ok, my very last question now .... What NAT port do I use on my router to allow me to access my TiVo (at home) from my browser (at work) - that's assuming woosh can give me a static ip address for home first !

Cheers for helping out a newbie. I had my first TiVo experience last night and it rocked.

Bruce

Phone menu: yeah, you gotta be in NTSC or PAL/GS mode to get at it. You can do the switch in Tivoweb. But it should all be automagic; check the phone menu in TivoWeb after a few days and it will tell you if it called OK.


You're on Macs, are you not? If so, and there's a mac running at home as well as the office, you'd be best off to use ssh. On the home mac, do SystemPrefs, Sharing, and enable Remote Login. Then on the NAT router forward TCP port 22 to the Mac's IP addy. Finally, from work, use this command in Terminal.app:

ssh {usernameOnHomeMachine}@{homeNATRouterExternalAddr ess} -C -L 8080:{tivoInternalIPAddress}:80

Enter password when asked (and say yes when it asks about accepting the host key), then point your web browser at work to http://localhost:8080 and you'll have a secure encrypted compressed tunnel to the tivo.

(all this works on windoze too, but I don't know the tools as well)