TiVo no longer on the network and I get nothing from the serial port.

[SSteve]

A few weeks ago I used PTVNet and InstantCake to set up a 400Mb drive for my Series 2 HDVR2 DirecTiVo. It worked fine first time. I bought the USB adapter from DVRupgrade, connected it to my network and it worked fine with DHCP. I followed the instructions to set it up with the static IP address 192.168.1.98. Again--worked great. The only problem is that the TiVo is 25 feet from the nearest network connection. So I put away the Cat5 cable stretched across the room and ordered a Buffalo Technology wireless adapter.

Today I was finally able to try out the wireless adapter and it didn't work. So I plugged the TiVo back into the network and now I can't communicate to it at all. I rebooted and still no luck. I know the cable is providing a good network connection-I can plug it into one of my computers and it works.

So I tried to communicate through the serial port. I have a (known good) serial cable that came with my Pronto remote and the internet seems to think that it should work with the TiVo. I started up HyperTerminal, set it to 115200 baud, 8N1, no flow control, connected it to the serial jack on the back of the TiVo, rebooted the TiVo, and pressed return a bunch of times while the TiVo was booting. Nothing.

Software version on the TiVo says 6.2a01-2-151. Telephone cable isn't connected. TiVo doesn't show up on my router's DHCP list.

From what I gather, my best bet is to get a bash shell through the serial port. (Which is great, because I know my way around the bash shell.) Is there something else I should try to get that working?

[Lou Jacob]

There are a lot of variables in the scenario you described, so its difficult to say what the problem could be (it could even be multiple things).

One obvious one is that your serial settings are incorrect; you should use 9600 baud for your connection (not 115,200, unless you've changed it in the the bootparm string in /init/002_hdstart.init).

Also, we recommend the use of TeraTerm (http://www.ayera.com/teraterm/) as HyperTerminal can be weird, at times.

I'd go back to a known, good configuration; perhaps with your old setup and then change just one thing at a time to see what might have caused the problem.

[SSteve]

There are a lot of variables in the scenario you described, so its difficult to say what the problem could be (it could even be multiple things).

One obvious one is that your serial settings are incorrect; you should use 9600 baud for your connection (not 115,200, unless you've changed it in the the bootparm string in /init/002_hdstart.init).

Thanks for the quick reply, Lou. That got me going. I found the 115,200 baud rate on the internet somewhere. I guess that was for unhacked units. I probably should have tried 9600, but it was late and my wife wanted me to stop and eat dinner. :)

Now I have everything working. The TiVo is connected to the Buffalo Tech wireless adapter and is happily chugging away on my wireless network. I can access it through telnet and ftp on my Mac, TivoWebPlus is running and my Windows machine is connected to the serial port and has a bash prompt.