TiVo Series 1/Mac OS X Patches

This directory contains patches for Series 1 TiVo upgrades (to allow you to expand your hard drive).

The Patches

WARNING:
These patches come as-is with NO WARRANTY. They may work for you or they may not. They worked for me with my Series 1 TiVo.

With that warning in mind, here are the patches. You will need the appropriate source code for this to be useful. Also, I have made no attempt to clean up these patches, so they will print a lot of debugging spew.

• MFSTools-snapshot050221-src.mac_os_x.patch---This patches MFS Tools (MFSTools) (source), which you can use to expand your hard drive. I used this to upgrade to a 500 GB hard drive in combination with the LBA48 kernel.
• tpip-1.2.mac_os_x.patch---This patches tpip, a tool to install a kernel.
• pdisk-tivo-a2.mac_os_x.patch---This patches pdisk, a tool that allows you to muck with partitions.

Apologies for the crude patches. I haven't made any attempts to clean them up. All that mattered to me was getting my TiVo booting again. :-)

WARNING:
The series 1 TiVo does not like having multiple swap partitions. I tried adding a second swap partition (smaller than the main one) and my TiVo stopped booting until I hacked it out manually with dd. You have been warned.

Fixing Mistakes

If you ever screw things up and need to find out what changed between two drives, dd is your friend. You can use iseek or oseek to skip a distance into your hard drive (depending on whether you are pulling dara from it or writing to it), and copy a partition to a file on your local disk. After the swap partition fiasco, I did this on both my upgraded drive and my original drive, then used bindiff (part of the Deck2OMF Suite) to compare the two files, find out what changed, and basically replace my changes to /etc/fstab with a line of spaces starting with a hash (#), then used dd to copy the data back to the upgraded drive. My TiVo boots now.

NOTE: The ENTIRE TiVo drive is byte-swapped on a 16-byte level. This means that EVERYTHING, including strings in text files on disk, strings in the partition table, etc. are all reversed. This will give you fits if you try to do much to the drive. That's why I had to resort to a byte-wise diff with bindiff as mentioned above just to FIND the swap entry within the partition. Ugh.

Colophon

All patches on this page may be freely distributed under the terms of the original software license. If the author of any of these tools wants me to take the patch down, email me at dgatwood at mac dot com. Thanks.