Hacking Series 2 beginning

[intellec7]

Hi, well I was about to use the sleeper ISO to hack my DirecTivo Series 2 (6.2), when I discovered that it doesn't work very well apparently. So I went around looking for ways to hack my Tivo (Basically I want to be able to extract video, other features like caller ID would be nice though) All of the guides that I was able to find suggested things like "Put file xxxxx in the harddrive by whatever method you prefer FTP, telnet, etc" Now, I have no idea about how to access my Tivo anyway at all. I already built a bash cable (RS-232) and I have the linksys USB Ethernet adaptor already. Any light would be greatly appreciated.

Thank you in advance,
Intellec7

[PlainBill]

You are about to embark on an educational journey. For a smooth trip, start with Cheer's roadmap (http://www.dealdatabase.com/forum/showthread.php?t=43599).

PlainBill

[josefl710]

ahhh i was in the same situation as well, series2 directivo with 6.2. Here is my experience on what i did.

1. I pulled my drive put it on my pc and carefully made sure windows didn't boot. instead i booted from the hindales mfs boot cd and fallowed hindales guide to backup my drive, make a tivo.bak backup image, and copy that image into a newer bigger hard drive. Make sure you don't boot windows with a tivo hard drive inside, it will screw it up. Fallow the directions for backing up your drive here (http://www.newreleasesvideo.com/hinsdale-how-to/index9.html).

2. Now you need to replace your kernel with a 3.5.1 kernel that has been patched with killhdinitrd. Look in the backup image and slice beggin tread post #592, there is a link to download 3.1.5 it had already been patched. Before you replace your kernel with the patched one you need to know what your boot partition is for your tivo so you need to run the bootpage command. I downloaded the free bootcd from PTVUpgrade here (http://www.ptvupgrade.com/products/software/lba48/index.html) the link is under downloads. Boot from the cd, run bootpage -p /dev/hdc if your new hard drive is secondary master. Your will get either 4 or 7, if you get 4 your kernel to be replaced is in partition 3, if you get 7 then its on 6. now you need to mount your cd partition ( assuming here you have the files you'll need like that patched kernel, tivotools, superpatch ect) and replace the kernel using the dd command (ex dd if=/cdrom/vmlinix.bak of=/dev/hdd6 bs=1024)... readup on that ( i don't thing you can mount the boot partition (3,6) using this boot disk just do the dd command it'll work).

3. now in order to activate the serial output to use your cable you need to run the command (still using ptvupgrade bootcd) bootpage -P "root=/dev/hda7 dsscon=true console=2,115200 " -C /dev/hdc assuming your boot partition is 7 and your tivo drive is on hdc. In order to get bash access you will need to mount your 4 or 7 partition (remember) and then create a rc.sysinit.author file in the /ect/rc.d/ directory. you can use the "vi" or "joe" built in text editors (again learn up) to create and edit your rc.sysinit.author file. To activate bash you need to add this to it /bin/bash</dev/ttyS2&>/dev/ttyS2& search to find out how to activate telnet,ftp and the path for the binary tools you'll need.

4. At this point you can boot and see the output using your serial cable, you should also have bash access. You will not be able to telnet or FTP yet, in order to do that you need to add those commands into your rc.sysinit.author file and install Alphawolf's all-in-one utilities into your tivo partition 4 or 7. I put mine in a directory labeled tvhacks, you will need to reference this directory in your rc.sysinit.author file. now you will have the ability to run most of the command you could run from the bootcd on the bash screen. At this point you can run the superpatch67 and netconfig.tcl scripts on your bash screen, you can upload them to your tvhacks directory using zmodem using your serial cable, then run them ( you need to make these files executible by using "chmod 755 filename" again learn up).

5. Now you should be able to ftp and telnet into your tivo using your usb card, (6.2 should load the drivers you need at boot up). There is no need to specify networking info on your rc.sysnit.. file, netconfig.tcl will take care of it. superpatch decripts the videos so you can just extract them using tytool from your pc. I hope this guides you in the right direction because you have alot of reading to do, took me about 5 days of reading and reading and i am still learning so don't take the steps i did as your only source since obviusly there are alot of holes in between like learning basic linux commands. Looking back it was alot of work but i finally got it and so can you, it was worth it though. trust me all the info you need is here you just gotta search.

good luck