Help with HD 10-250 DTivo and tivoapp

[steve90071]

In attempting to modify "tivoapp" to disable encryption, I have apparently damaged "tivoapp" because when I went to reboot, Tivo cannot get past the "just a few more seconds" screen. I can still ftp and telnet. I replaced the modified "tivoapp" with the "tivoapp.tmp" that was created when I started the disable encryption process, but that did not fix the problem. I did remount to rw and did chmod 755 the application. And I did remount to ro before rebooting.

Any help would be appreciated.

[MarkZ]

It sounds like you're doing everything right. Do you know what line you actually typed while attempting the tivoapp edit?

Could you have changed something else by mistake? You might check time-stamps of the files to see.

Is it possible that the startup script isn't ending because you didn't run something as a service?

Did this work before you edited tivoapp?

M

[steve90071]

I was using Iron Man's howto for killhdinitrid on my HDTivo. After applying killhdinitrid and telnet and ftp daemons and creating the sysinit.author file and .profile, I installed the hard drive into my Tivo and started up. All went well. I made a couple of test recordings and then proceeded to install basic unix commands, tivowebplus (it was working) and mfs_ftp (which I attempted to start but it did not). I then began to patch tivoapp to disable encryption. Here is my first error. I incorrectly dd'd the tivoapp in that I ran "echo -ne "\x3c\x02\x00\x00" | dd conv=notrunc of=tivoapp bs=1" (without the beginning and ending " marks). I left off the last part of the command which was "seek=6978700" (again, no " marks).

Then, my next mistake. I ran the entire command again, but this time with the full command.

The result was that when I rebooted the Tivo it stops at "a few seconds more" screen.

As noted, I can telnet and ftp. I have attempted to run several operations, like mfs_ftp and chiphercheck, but get an "unable to execute binaries" result. I know they are the correct binaries and that they are executable.

[MarkZ]

Ummm, now when you restart does the tivo get past the welcome screen, or are you still stuck there?

If it's past all that then you just have the wrong binaries (the non-mips ones).

If it doesn't get past the welcome screen then you need to put the old tivoapp back. If that doesn't work you may be doomed to getting the old drive back and using that image to start with.

Obviously when you left off the seek part you told dd to just change the early part of the file. It would make the tivoapp file random junk (maybe not executable).

Assuming you can't get past the welcome screen... I would make sure that your rc.sysinit.author file isn't just stopping. If you have a command that doesn't end (such as running a program like bash that doesn't exit) the computer will just "stop" at that point - things keep running but it stops the thread that was going to continue booting the tivo. usually those lines have an & at the end to tell linux to run the program as a daemon.

M

[steve90071]

I'm confident I have the right binaries. I think what happened is I just nucked "tivoapp" as you suggest. So, I will start over and try to get it right this time. Thank goodness I backed up the original drive!