RedHat 9 TiVo Blaster Kernel

[trainboy]

I got really tired of swapping boot disks around while blasting the TiVo.
Every guy and his dog has one.

So, after a day of kernel hacking, I now have a RedHat 9 kernel that will
recognize TiVo partition tables. Used in conjunction with bswap, one can
mount the Ext2 partitions of TiVo hard drives for blasting with utility
programs, hackz, etc. One can also run MFS tools against the drive,
thereby creating a single boot machine for TiVo blasting.

The source goes in ../fs/partitions. One
word of caution, when compiling. Get rid of the "custom" suffix of the
kernel (change "2.4.20-8custom" to just "2.4.20-8" in the top level
Makefile of your linux kernel source tree). This will allow the
replacement kernel to be run with the existing modules directory and
speed up your compile process (all you need is "make bzImage").

The enclosed lilo.conf is a sample for configuring lilo to add an extra
kernel called "tivohack". Booting into "tivohack" will byte swap
/dev/hdb and /dev/hdc plus boot the hacked kernel. If you boot the
kernel without byte swapping (don't forget "ide=nodma"), it will dump
the TiVo partition information but issue a message reminding you to
use byte swapping (you won't get far without it). It will also skip
registering the partition table of the non-swapped drive so that you
can't do any damage to it.

Also, if anybody wants to give me the address of an FTP site or two, I can upload a pre-built kernel for RedHat 9.

[trainboy]

While we're at it, I ported and updated the hacks to ide-probe to
unlock Quantum drives. This code tries to determine, from drive
geometry, whether a Quantum drive is locked by the TiVo. If so,
the magic challenge/response sequence to unlock the drive is sent.

The header file goes in include/linux and the C file goes in
drivers/ide.

I think that's pretty much it for the one OS does it all. Happy
blasting.

[Kleptonooch]

I'm game for the RedHat 9 pre-built kernel. Let me know how you want to do it / upload it.

Any chance of you emailing it to me or something now so I can use it? My unit is pretty screwed right now.

[BTUx9]

Thanx a bunch for the files, trainboy. Patched RH9 (after some troubles - all self-inflicted). Seems to work great. These should be put up on tivostuff. Wonder if they'd work on other 2.4 kernels.

[compwiz312]

I feel like such a n00b for having to ask this, but my experience with Linux is rather limited.

Anyway, I installed Redhat 9 with kernel source 2.4.20-8 and after loading the default configuration file (from /boot) and updating it with mac partition support among other things, I went ahead and ran "make dep" and once that finished, I ran "make bzImage".

After that, I took the vmlinux file that was made and moved it to by boot partition, renamed it to vmlinux-tivo and setup Grub to boot to it (both with and without byte swapping). However, when I try and boot it, I can an error along the lines of "Error 13: Invalid or unsupported executible format"

Anyone have any suggestions on how what would have caused this error and how I can fix it or failing that, could someone post their precomiled kernel for us to all use.

Thanks in advance

[erhan]

For those who are having difficulty compiling the kernel, you can simply use the tivopart from alldeadhomiez and revalidate the partition table.

This updates the in-memory structures and makes your kernel recognize the disk (until the next reboot, of course).

[compwiz312]

That tivopart utility is definetly the best, I never even knew it existed. It seems to have solved all of my Tivo problems. Thanks.

On another note, is there any way to change the byteswap properties of a drive without having to reboot using a custom grub or lilo setup?

[cspolk]

can anyone tell me whare I can get tivopart?? thanks!

[fixn278]

Originally Posted by trainboy

Also, if anybody wants to give me the address of an FTP site or two, I can upload a pre-built kernel for RedHat 9.

If you use the upload page on Tivostuff and zip it with a readme, I will make sure it gets to the downloads page.