The Series4 (TiVo Premiere) Development Thread

[Omikron]

Donation button now fixed. :-)

[Omikron]

Premiere Elite has been requisitioned. More hardware details coming soon when I return in late October...

[unitron]

Omikron,

Did you ever solve the "hooking up a Premiere drive to a PC and looking at the partition map makes it unbootable" problem?

If so, is there somewhere I can read about it?

[kmt]

Nothing here in 5 months. Is there still work going on?

[T_RJ]

Just took the plunge for a Premiere elite, any developments on the series 4

[T_RJ]

I just picked up a premiere xl with a bad image on the drive.
Tivo will boot up to "just a few more minutes" than reboots.
I have tested the drive, kickstart 54 and it is good.
I have copied the drive to a new drive, no dice.
Kickstart 57,51, 52 no dice.
Kickstart 58 does the same as 52.
Kickstart 56 does not work.
Any way to force the Tivo to call home and download new software?
Or is my only option to copy from a working Tivo?

[unitron]

I just picked up a premiere xl with a bad image ob the drive.
Tivo will bot up to "just a few more minutes" than reboots.
I have tested the drive, kickstart 54 and it is good.
I have copied the drive to a new drive, no dice.
Kickstart 57,51, 52 no dice.
Kickstart 58 does the same as 52.
Kickstart 56 does not work.
Any way to force the Tivo

Get another Premiere XL, take out the drive, hook it and the drive from the first one to a computer, boot with a cd with dd, or dd_rescue, or ddrescue on it and make a byte for byte copy.

At this point the only image for a Series 4 drive is another drive from the same model.

Do not under any circumstances let Windows boot with either drive attached. (that's probably how the previous owner screwed up the drive in the first place)

What did you use to (apparently unsuccessfully) copy the drive to the new drive?

[T_RJ]

I used JMFS to copy and the copy behaves the same as the original drive.
I guess I will have to borrow one from Best Buy and copy the drive than return it.
Are there any images available, or is DD the only way?
The Tivo boots but never all the way.
Wiil my Elite drive work in the XL?
I could copy that.

[T_RJ]

Any way to mount the drive and have a look at the logs to see what the issue is?
Or connect a serial connection to watch the boot process and see where it fails?

[T_RJ]

Well I borrowed a Premiere XL from best buy.
Copying drive now.
Now the 4 hour wait.....

[T_RJ]

Ok that fixed it!
Now going to make another copy and then return the "loaner" from Best Buy!

[Thinkdiff]

Finally upgraded to the TiVo Elite.. ready for some hacking

I'm not sure if I have the heart to start messing with a $800 piece of equipment though. Maybe I'll pick up a $50 Premiere to do some testing.

[T_RJ]

I have a premiere coming I picked up off Ebay for $40 delivered.
Plan on using it for "Experimenting".
Going to sell the premiere XL with a 2 gig drive upgrade and one of my 2 gig HD's to help fund the new Tivo's.

[T_RJ]

Will a Premiere XL image work on a Premiere?

[tivo4mevo]

I'll speculate no, based upon the inability to successfully run a TiVoHD XL image on a TiVoHD (see this post here: link). IIRC, the image would appear to work, but unit would run out of guidedata (the belief being that the discrepancy between the unit's TSN and that of the software "ID" caused the guidedata phone home to fail).

The solution was to update an XL image to include the MFS objects from a non-XL image, thus causing the software "ID" to report as non-XL. This could be repeated for the premiere, but is complicated as the MFS extraction/injection work would need to be done by transporting the drive to a hackable unit (Series3). I think the "partition coalesce" methods to utilize a 2TB drive in a premiere (e.g., JMFS method) are the easier route.