NetReady Information and Support Resources

[Lou Jacob]

NetReady was announced by PTVupgrade (DVRupgrade) in March, 2004 and is for all Series1 standalone and DirecTiVo DVRs.

The idea behind NetReady was to provide kits for these units which are pre-configured with the basic TurboNet and CacheCard drivers so that if one were to add a TurboNet or CacheCard to their system at a later date, they would not need to remove the drive from the TiVo and connect to a PC to install any drivers or additional software.

NetReady drives (or drives prepared with InstantCake) come pre-configured with the most current TurboNet/CacheCard drivers (released in February, 2005) and with FTP enabled.

By following simple step-by-step instructions provided by DVRupgrade (http://www.dvrupgrade.com/dvr/stores/1/netready.cfm), NetReady drives can be "unlocked" to allow for telnet access, and additional software, such as TiVoWeb, can be easily installed with a pre-packaged version (http://www.dvrupgrade.com/dvr/stores/1/install-core-and-tivoweb.cfm) provided by DVRupgrade.

Currently, DVRupgrade offers no additional support or development for NetReady, however it is important to note that all kits sold by DVRupgrade are equipped with the NetReady software so that units can be easily networked using a genuine TurboNet or CacheCard at a later date.

[kman68]

Is there anyway to remove the Net Ready part of the installation? Net Ready has rendered my serial port useless. An external modem can not communicate via the serial port after Instantcake Net Ready SW was installed.

[kman68]

External modem problem fixed. After Instant cake update:

Connect Tivo to a pc via serial DB9 connection with Null Modem. Start a terminal session with HyperTerminal or similar application. Connect with settings:

COM1, 9600, None for flow control.

Reboot Tivo. During the first few seconds of boot screen hit "Enter" once. This brings up a BASH prompt. Type and hit Enter after each line:

rootwrite
mv /BASH_ON /BASH_OFF
rootread
sync
reboot

An external modem will work with Tivo again.

[MichaelBurns62697]

Back in November of 2007, I used InstantCake to upgrade the drives in my Philips HRD312 to 600GB (two 300GB drives) and I installed a TurboNet card at the same time. My undersatnding is that this version of InstantCake should have installed all of the drivers for TurboNet & CachCard. All worked very well, with the drives & networking all functional. The web interface in the Tivo unit reads "TiVo Web Project - TCL v1.9.4".

Today, I replaced the TurboNet card with a CacheCard 2.2, with a 512MB module. Again, the ethernet/web part all works fine. But... I do not see any speed increase when "Npw Playing" is selected. If I FTP into the Tivo (via the network), at the top level I do see , in addition to the directories "bin", "dev", "dist", "etc", and a number of other directories, there are files called "BASH_ON", "CACHECARD_ON", "CACHECARD_TEST" & "TIVOWEB_ON".

Anyway, is there any way to query the Tivo to tell if it really detects that 512MB of RAM on the cachecard, and knows to use it?

[Lou Jacob]

Back in November of 2007, I used InstantCake to upgrade the drives in my Philips HRD312 to 600GB (two 300GB drives) and I installed a TurboNet card at the same time. My undersatnding is that this version of InstantCake should have installed all of the drivers for TurboNet & CachCard. All worked very well, with the drives & networking all functional. The web interface in the Tivo unit reads "TiVo Web Project - TCL v1.9.4".

Today, I replaced the TurboNet card with a CacheCard 2.2, with a 512MB module. Again, the ethernet/web part all works fine. But... I do not see any speed increase when "Npw Playing" is selected. If I FTP into the Tivo (via the network), at the top level I do see , in addition to the directories "bin", "dev", "dist", "etc", and a number of other directories, there are files called "BASH_ON", "CACHECARD_ON", "CACHECARD_TEST" & "TIVOWEB_ON".

Anyway, is there any way to query the Tivo to tell if it really detects that 512MB of RAM on the cachecard, and knows to use it?

When you boot your TiVo you should see a 'splash screen' when it loads the CacheCard driver and loads the database into memory...

It sounds like it is working (at least partly) since the network adapter is accessible. But you should also see that the database is loading up in memory during boot time - if the screen goes red and you get errors, it could be skipping the memory portion of the boot process...

[MichaelBurns62697]

There never is a splash screen mentioning the CacheCard. The Tivo is starting screen shows, then a pink flash for a frame or two (too fast to see what it is), and then the DVRupgrade screen shows until the Philips logo and the Tivo intro starts. I suppose I could try installing the cachecard drivers manually.

[Lou Jacob]

There never is a splash screen mentioning the CacheCard. The Tivo is starting screen shows, then a pink flash for a frame or two (too fast to see what it is), and then the DVRupgrade screen shows until the Philips logo and the Tivo intro starts. I suppose I could try installing the cachecard drivers manually.

I wouldn't recommend that - InstantCake takes care of that for you. I'd look at your hardware installation, first - it could be that the card isn't inserted all the way, or the memory isn't inserted all the way, OR the memory could be incompatible.

[MichaelBurns62697]

I wouldn't recommend that - InstantCake takes care of that for you. I'd look at your hardware installation, first - it could be that the card isn't inserted all the way, or the memory isn't inserted all the way, OR the memory could be incompatible.
Apparently the InstantCake of the vintage I had (Nov 2007) does not really have the CacheCard drivers installed and operating. So I downloaded the drivers from SiliconDust and did a native install per their instructions. That worked fine, and the unit started displaying the CacheCard splash screen, the various progress bars as it creates the cache and the “Now Playing” selection is very fast.

Unfortunately, I read your reply on a different message thread (DRVPlayground) about fixing the IP address by editing the rc.net file and changing ./IP_DHCP to ./IP_STATIC in the /etc/rc.d directory. I tried that because the CacheCard driver was giving the DHCP server a fake & often changing MAC address, which makes it so having the DHCP server effectively fix the Tivo’s IP address by pre-reserving a specific IP address for the Tivo’s MAC address no longer works. (This works fine with fine with my old TurboNet card, as well as every other device with a web interface on my network.)

Anyway, that DRVPlayground method ended up disabling the Cachecards network port. By disabling, I mean it was turned off so that to the router, the cable was dead. (Not even a connection light.) To recover, I had to reload the cachcard drivers via the serial port (1.1M CacheCard installation file at 9600 baud takes a while to upload to the Tivo) and reapply the Cachecard driver install. It’s now all working again. I did notice that the SiliconDust CacheCard drive installation now does offer an option to fix the units IP address as part of the installation.

At some later time I will probably reapply the Cachecard driver install with that option to see if it works.

[Lou Jacob]

CacheCard drivers have been available as part of InstantCake for this model since the end of 2004. Perhaps there was a problem with the installation when you imaged the drive?

If you have an extra drive, you may want to try to image it and see how it goes; then the instructions I posted at DVRplayground should work fine - we've not made any changes to the structure / filenames in quite some time (the last release of InstantCake for your model was at the beginning of 2008).

Lou

PS I double-checked the Silicondust site; they have not had a driver release since February 2005, so the ones included in your version of InstantCake are the latest ones, as far as I can tell.