I just went through modding my first tivo.

The tools that the oztivo group provided were flawless, but some of the other stuff left me scratching my head a bit, so I thought I would share them here in case it helps others

The issues were mainly because I dont understand much about the tivo's in general, and also a few visits from Murphy.

- Tivo HDD's don't mount in windows.
In hindsight, this should have been obvious (tivo is linux after all). My tivo with unknown origin would not boot past the "welcome, powering up" page, so I was assuming a dead HDD. When connected to windows with a USB->SATA adapter, it would not mount as a drive, so I was pretty sure it was dead. It would also not be seen by WinMFS, so I was certain! Turns out that it wasn't entirely dead, just that windows doesn't mount linux drives by default. The WinMFS issue is explained next.

- WinMFS must be run in administrator (at least in Win10) to be able to find drives
To be fair, I notice warnings from others about this (now that I know about it). If it isn't run as admin, it wouldn't see any HDDs. It wasn't until someone here mentioned it in a reply that I thought I'd try, and it could then recognise the new HDD, (as well as the old one that I thought was busted).

- The PLCC adapters that come with the TL866 programmer can be dodgy
I've used my prom programmer before, but never the PLCC adapter. It couldn't read the new PROM chips, and couldn't read the TiVo prom chips. I thought I was screwed until a continuity test showed that one of thee header pins was not making contact (it looked fine, and actually had continuity often when probed, but not always). A resolder fixed it. Turns out it wasn't just one pin, and this caught me out again later, so I just resoldered them all.

-The PLCC sockets cannot be installed by mere mortals (without mods)
I do have a lot of SMD experience (QFN, fine QFP, BGA, etc) and thousands of $$$ of SMD equipment, but I've never worked with PLCC. I thought it would be a walk in the park (and removing the old chip was), but fitting the socket was a PITA! You cannot get to the pins without melting the socket to hell, even with the finest tips. You cannot really use a heatgun without sending the socket into an unreliable pile of melted goo. The only option is to cut out the center (and refit later) or just solder the new prom directly. I stubbornly wanted a socket, so i did, but directly soldering the prom back is the smart option.

- The dial code has to be set to 140 manually
I assumed that the software script automatically changed the dial code to the oztivo value (140), but when I booted, I saw it was 000. I assumed that wouldn't work, so found where to change it in the menus, but it maybe a trap for other rookies like me.

- a tivo guided setup doesn't work on wifi (at least for me), and needs ethernet connection
Wifi on the tivo has been fine for me for many years of tv guide, and it worked to do a force connect after the upgrade as well. I needed to do a full reset (because my image was from a different TiVo), followed by a guided setup, and no matter why I did, it would fail at "connecting" with "negotiation failed". Then I remembered this happening when I bought my main TV 7 years ago, and I had to connect with ethernet to get it setup. That worked, and now wifi does for general tv guide info. I thought that maybe it was just me, but it's happened twice now, using completely different house/modem/isp/tivo so maybe will cause issues to others.

As you can see, most of these are probably well understood by TiVo experts, but I'm not one of them.

Also, not one of them had anything to do with the work done by the oztivo group... so full credit and thanks for such a great job!

Any questions or corrections, let me know.

Cheers,
Tim