# serial cable does nothing.



## sbutton (Nov 11, 2006)

Hi,

I've just made my own serial cable and tried connecting it, and it does nothing when connected to my WinXP laptop. It *could* be the USB <-> serial dongle thingy I've just bought, but my guess is that's OK as I get a COM18 appear which I've chosen. Perhaps I need to get my old VT320 out from the loft!

The cable is from (URL REMOVED AS IT'S MY FIRST POST) and I've tested the pinouts with a meter.

I've tried switching the TiVo on with the thing connected at 9600-N-8-1, but nothing gets shown on the laptop hyperterm screen.

My initial problem is that I want to record radio programs for the children (on BBC Radio 7). I've also tried connecting an RF cable to my Sky box and re-running guided setup, but at the point it asks for the remote codes from my cable box (actually just the Sky box again) there is nothing shown on the screen. I've tried connecting BOTH the RF outputs from Sky box, but nothing comes out...

so, I thought I'd try the hack to get the TiVo to put a 0 in front of the channel numbers it sends. For which I'll need to Serial cable to install the bash script.

Any suggestions?

Thanks,

Steve Button


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## katman (Jun 4, 2002)

Have you set up the "Flow Control" in Hyperterminal to be "NONE".

By default it assumes "Hardware Control" and without all the handshaking wires it wont do anything.


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## PPJ (Jun 26, 2002)

I'm not absolutely sure about this, but I think that in order to get anything out of the serial connection, you first need to pull the drive and modify certain start-up scripts.

Can't confirm this, since both my tivos have network cards and I think the process of installing these also enables the serial port.

Can anyone confirm this?

The pinout of my lead is like this, if you want something to check yours against.

If you're doing a search, the key phrase is "getting to bash prompt" or something similar.


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## Raisltin Majere (Mar 13, 2004)

Have you seen Mrtickle's sig?

http://www.tivocommunity.com/tivo-vb/member.php?u=5475

I used the black widow guide, which you can get from mrtickle's sig


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## TDaxGav (Jun 5, 2003)

I'm busy trying this at the moment with my old Tivo as well... altho I'm getting pickled at the first hurdle of trying to find the kazymyr boot cd as 9th doesn't seem to mirror it any more.


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## 6022tivo (Oct 29, 2002)

I used a serial cable to get into the config after I soldered an additional 16mb to the system board of the tivo. 

I could test and set the prom chip to know it has and can use 32MB rather than the 16 MB it had.

I can not remember the settings, but I am sure I had to press enter a few times as the tivo was powered up. Also can not remember the system password and user off hand, but I did find it on the forums.


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## mikerr (Jun 2, 2005)

Can anyone confirm they have got a bash prompt over serial since 2.5.5 ?
I *think* they might have removed this ability ?!


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## lenwuk (Oct 3, 2004)

Yes, Bash over serial works in 2.5.5, but to use it you first have to fire up a Bash shell on the TiVo.
You need this line at the end of your /etc/rc.d/rc.sysinit file . . . 
/bin/bash --login < /dev/ttyS3 >& /dev/ttyS3 &
So obviously you have to mount the TiVo drive in a PC to do this.

You CAN get access to a Bash prompt at boot time without any TiVo mods at all
(but it's of very limited use) -
Configure your terminal program like this -
9600 baud
8 data bits
No stopbits
1 parity bit
Xon/Xoff handshake
(I think this is right- if not try 9600,8,1 stopbit, no parity,no flow control)

Boot the TiVo, and straight away (timing is tricky) hit enter in your terminal program.
If you get the timing right, you should see -
"Verify password:"
enter "factory"
and you'll be in the TiVo diagnostic menu.
This will at least verify that your serial cable is OK.

Regards, Len


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