Vanishing network and nic_install error

[xxxx]

My Turbonet card has been working happily for the last few months on my SA UK Tivo. I installed it mostly to get guide data via the internet as I have to pay for my Tivo dial-ups.

Last Saturday I noticed that the daily download had failed so I initiated another one using Tivoweb. That failed also. FTP, bash and everything else were OK but when the dial-up got to the "connecting" point I could see that there was no data being transmitted over the network. A quick look by FTP at some of the Tivo logs (not that I understand very much in them) showed many lines of errors. I rebooted everything and tried again. No better.

A couple of days later, thinking that it might be something wrong with WinXP networking I deleted the network card and allowed XP to find it again. It did this but then it couldn't find the Tivo on the network. I tried that several times but no joy.

So I took the A drive out of the Tivo (the Tivo is working fine, apart from the guide data download) and tried to run nic_install on it again to check the IP parameters. There I just get "error: can't find MFS".

So I'm stuck. Windows can't find the Tivo and I can't run nic_install to get the network back up, or even to get the Tivo to connect using the modem. I'd rather not delete everything and re-install my virgin backup as I would lose about 40 hours of recordings that I haven't seen yet. Any ideas gratefully accepted! TIA

[pythag]

Sorry I probably can't help with the problem, but I'm curious:

Why do you have to pay for Tivo dial-ups? I thought it was free throughout the UK?

Anyway, this maybe a long shot for you: When you put the drive back in the PC to run nic_install did you check that it was unlocked and you could mount the partitions?

[xxxx]

Why do you have to pay for Tivo dial-ups? I thought it was free throughout the UK?

It is, but I'm not in the UK. I use my UK Tivo for Sky Digital on the continent. So without using PPP over my free internet connection the best I could do is get my Tivo to dial a local UUNet pop and pay for the call. Hence the Turbonet card.

Oddly when I tried the same procedures over again this morning nic_install had no trouble finding MFS and subsequently WinXP had no trouble finding my Tivo on the network. So I have no idea what the problem was but it's gone and I've still got my recordings! All's well that ends well. :)