HELP - Boot Parm Typo

[timbohlsen]

I have inherited a tivo from a friend going o/s. After getting cabling sorted out, and guide data up to date I needed to change the IR, as he had Optus in Sydney, and I’m on Foxtel Digital. So followed howto’s to change the boot parameters to get into maint mode / guided setup. Here’s my goof:

I put a typo into the parms, specifically I left off the boot= after the first quote, i.e. I entered:
bootpage -P '/dev/hda4 GS=1…. Etc

Following this I rebooted and sat on the welcome screen for about 2 minutes before thinking ‘Oh S**t’… This was after being overly cautious checking every character typed so I feel pretty foolish.

So after having make the wife ecstatic being able to manually record for the last week I now face being in the doghouse with a non-functional tivo.

I imagine the only solution will be to take the drive out and place into the PC, but my question is then whether it will be possible to ‘patch’ the drive without losing the contents (and marriage :-| )

Any help gratefully received

Tim.

[petestrash]

Hi Tim,

Welcome to the forums.

If you can connect a serial cable between the TiVo and a PC, you could follow the instructions here:

http://minnie.tuhs.org/twiki/bin/view/FAQ/AccessingTivoBootMenuAndOrChangingBootParameters

If not, then there's not much choice but pull the drive.

A little late for you this time, but you can put your tivo into maintenance mode through tivoweb, this stops any potential TiVo stopping typos when manually entering commands.

Peter

[Darren King]

A little late for you this time, but you can put your tivo into maintenance mode through tivoweb, this stops any potential TiVo stopping typos when manually entering commands.

Correct. I've also made the goof once - very early in the world of "guided setup" software early last year and TiVoWEB is the best way to aviod typos.... amazing how you see them AFTER you hit the enter key :)

Gee has it been 18 months already we have had Guided Setup? Even harder for new people to believe is that they are spoilt rotten as some of us can remember having to manually configure a TiVo for use in Australia/NZ!

[timbohlsen]

Peter/Darren,

Thank you both greatly. I was able to resolve things with the bootmenu.... I had already wasted a lot of time with the drive pulled trying to boot up PC from seemingly non-functional tivo image boot CD's...

I will probably do some searching/reading on the tivoweb path. Initially I look at it and while I connect OK through serial, it seems I have no IP connectivity ?? I am using hyperterm from Win98 on an old laptop direct over serial Com1, so unsure if that's an issue ?? I will search the FAQs but any immediate tips you know would help.

I did in a past life (last year) try to get networking over serial to XP going, but was snookered by NAT/routing/ADSL issues. I'm a long term IT guy but I remember at the time feeling like a right royal dinasour for the first time ;-)

Thanks again for the immediate spot on help !!

Regards,
Tim.

[Darren King]

My advice: spend $70AUD and buy an X-Factor network card. Well worth the investment and Peter sells them. I do have a couple too but I'm not going to cut Peter's lunch as he is the man for them in Australia.

[petestrash]

I will probably do some searching/reading on the tivoweb path. Initially I look at it and while I connect OK through serial, it seems I have no IP connectivity ?? I am using hyperterm from Win98 on an old laptop direct over serial Com1, so unsure if that's an issue ?? I will search the FAQs but any immediate tips you know would help.

This is really only telnet, giving you access to the shell. It won't really give you any tivoweb fuctionality.


I did in a past life (last year) try to get networking over serial to XP going, but was snookered by NAT/routing/ADSL issues. I'm a long term IT guy but I remember at the time feeling like a right royal dinasour for the first time ;-)

This works fine, but is much simpler to setup if you use a hardware router (which most ADSL modems are these days) rather than trying to route via software.

Peter.