# Welcome.Powering Up... after editing rc.sysinit



## ARC (Dec 16, 2001)

After too much reading of various threads in attempt to find out how to make my TiVo dial in to get the 6.3d upgrade , I found what I thought was a fix for my HR10-250 not making the phone call in - in short, I edited the rc.sysint (not author) file so that 
Debug_board=true (it was false) and then rebooted my TiVo.

At this point, it will not go further than Welcome. Powering Up...
I cannot ping it, telnet in. 
It looks like I have managed to hose myself. 
Suggestions on why it fails to boot? Am I going to have to pull the drive? <grrr>


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## pokegol (Feb 24, 2003)

Put your drive back into your computer and check the permissions on the rc.sysinit file. They are probably set wrong. Do a chmod 777 rc.sysinit to fix them.


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## Redux (Oct 19, 2004)

pokegol said:


> Put your drive back into your computer and check the permissions on the rc.sysinit file. They are probably set wrong. Do a chmod 777 rc.sysinit to fix them.


Or the line endings were not saved correctly by the text editor he used. These are the usual suspects.


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## ARC (Dec 16, 2001)

Thank you for responding. (!)
In the interest of "when you find yourself in a hole, first, stop digging", I would sure be grateful for further assistance.

I have pulled the TiVo drive and can install it in an empty PC. (I pulled all the cables on the hard drives<G>)
I have a CD Rom IDE drive with the motherboard set to boot to CDROM. I can attach the CD as secondary Master (/dev/hdc), and the TiVo drive as Secondary slave (/dev/hdd) if that is preferable.

The weakknees boot CD I have from my original hack last year will boot and get me to a prompt.

Today, before I lost the ability to boot my HR10-250, before I FTP'd the edited rc.sysinit from my WinXP laptop back to the Tivo drive, I used WS FTP Pro to rename the original to rc.sysinit.bak . I "think" that this took, but I confess I did not verify with a refresh. 
So in order to fix my problem, to chmod the edited file that I sent back over, can anyone help me with the series of linux commands that I need to use that would let me ? 
(I've got to use the dos equivs below of what I THINK needs to be done, in the order needed, since I am not familiar/confident of the linux commands needed):
After CD ROM booting to a prompt,

1. mount the hard drive readwrite

2. DIR the \etc\rc.sys folder to verify its contents (I think that is the subdirectory)

If a rc.sysinit.bak doesn't exist, I think the syntax for the edited file would be:

3a. chmod 777 rc.sysinit

and if there is a .bak file, and it would be better to resume that file, then

3b. DEL rc.sysinit

and then

3c. copy rc.sysinit.bak rc.sysinit

4. mount read only

Power off and put drive back in TiVo and pray

If using wordpad screwed up the file, how would I amend the existing rc.sysinit file on the drive to repair that? 
I am attaching a zip of the rc.sysinit that I sent over that is the cause of my pain... sure would be grateful if you could check and see if carriage returns/line feeds are indeed part of my problem...I am also including the edited rc.sysinit.author file that I first edited in a futile attempt to allow a phone call in to start the 6.3d download/upgrade. Perhaps I screwed the pooch on that file and that is why I still cannot get a phone call to go through past "negotiating..." ?

Thanks - and I can offer help as an archery coach to anyone if repayment in kind would be accepted (as one of < 100 USA Archery High Performance Regional Coaches)...Obviously I am not a Linux educated user....
Ron,
webmaster
http://www.texasarchery.org


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## BTUx9 (Nov 13, 2003)

those are dos commands... equivalent linux commands would be along the lines:
> cd /etc/rc.d
> ls

if rc.sysinit.bak exists, then:
> rm rc.sysinit
> mv rc.sysinit.bak rc.sysinit

otherwise:
> chmod 777 rc.sysinit.bak

p.s. Yes, the files you posted have DOS line endings... the command "dos2unix <filename>" can repair those if the backup didn't get made of your original files


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## ARC (Dec 16, 2001)

before doing anything else last night I decided to back up my current 750gig TiVo 3.1.5f drive. 
Put it into my driveless PC, a reasonably fast cpu with 1 gig of ram, booted on a MFSTools CD. The Tivo drive I set to primary slave, the new drive to secondary master. 
I did a 
hdparm -d1 /dev/hdb
hdparm -d1 /dev/hdc
and then did a 
dd if=dev/hdb of=/dev/hdc 
The hard disk light went on, and has been on for nearly 24 hours now. 
Any chance that I have the record for the slowest/longest datadump?  
I'm beginning to regret the dd . 

I had started out trying to use mfsbackup -Tao but errored out with a message that the destination wasn't large enough. They are BOTH by Seagate, 750 gig eide drives. Would mfsbackup / mfsrestore have been faster? 
did I do anything incorrectly with dd or the dma settings? Any guesses on how long I can expect?


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## JWThiers (Apr 13, 2005)

Don't know how long a dd of a 750GB drive takes but I read that a dd of the drive on an appletv (30, 40? GB) takes about 12 hours. That is the only speed reference I've heard about using dd. So that might apply but might not. I've never used dd (I've always just used a fresh image), but I imagine just about anything that is going at every byte of a 750GB drive will take a while.


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## ARC (Dec 16, 2001)

The backup FINALLY finished - took around 36 hours. yikes.
I now am not seeing what I expected - I need some help understanding what I am seeing.
I boot on the CD as secondary master (HDC) and the TiVo drive is secondary slave (HDD). 
after boot, I type 
*bootpage -p /dev/hdd *
which returns root=/dev/hda7

so I type
*mount /dev/hdd7 /mnt/d* and then 
*cd /mnt/d* and then 
*ls*
which lists the summary of files that I THINK matches the directorys that I recall from when I could telnet in.
Thinking I am on the right track, I type 
*cd /etc/rc.d* and then 
*ls*
and this is where it is weird/unexpected. It returns, in green:
rc.S* rc.inet1*

but no other files. I was expecting the rc.sysint and rc.sysint.author files.

What am I seeing, and what did I do wrong?

Also, do I need to issue a mount rw somewhere along the way?

if these two files are missing in action, I can burn them from my winxp laptop to a CD, swap the boot CD with the new CD, and then copy them to etc/rc.d , (what would be the command and do I need to unmount/mount the CD drive in the process?) , then use chmod 777 for each, then dos2unix for each.
(the above is more of a question than a statement)...

<sigh> As always, your help would be appreciated...


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## BTUx9 (Nov 13, 2003)

ARC said:


> Thinking I am on the right track, I type
> *cd /etc/rc.d* and then
> *ls*
> and this is where it is weird/unexpected. It returns, in green:
> ...


 try "cd /mnt/d/etc/rc.d"



> Also, do I need to issue a mount rw somewhere along the way?


no... the ro/rw issue is only when connecting to a running tivo


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## ARC (Dec 16, 2001)

Thanks, that command worked and I was able to see the contents of the folder, but only the author file had a .bak, so the attempt to create a bak of the rc.sysinit file with my WS FTP Pro didn't work. 

I found the command file chmod in the /bin folder, and after changing to that folder I was able to issue a chmod 777 /mnt/d/etc/rc.d/rc.sysinit and same command for the .author file. 

I reinstalled the drive after chmodding to see if that fixed the problem, no joy. 

Unfortunately, I am not able to find the dos2unix command file, in order to strip out the carriage returns in the two files, which is what I must do next. (after putting the drive back into the PC)

If the dos2unix file is on the TiVo drive (and it must be, I have used that command via telnet before, I think) then how can I locate it? FFind doesn't work when I boot from the CD, and I think it isn't path'd...

I'll keep fishing around the folders in the meantime...  

While I have the drive in the PC - is there any way to manually dl the 6.3d file from the net and copy it over using a CD ? (I am a glutton for punishment, my wife is totally POd that I have broke the TV (Cain't watch anything for 2+ days now)) but whut the heck...


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## BTUx9 (Nov 13, 2003)

re: 6.3d: I'd suggest only breaking 1 thing at a time

re: dos2unix... depends on your tivo linux CD... I'm not sure if ANY of them have it, to tell the truth.
If you have an editor that handles dos/unix line endings properly, you should be able to take the files you posted, and have it convert them to be unix-compatible (not sure about textpad, but ultraedit definitely supports this)


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## whitepelican (Feb 15, 2005)

Textpad allows you to save as a UNIX file format.


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## ARC (Dec 16, 2001)

If my Tivo normally supports that command (dos2unix) when I am telnet'd in to it, shouldn't there be a copy of dos2unix on the drive somewhere? 

I've been using "find" to try and locate it with no success. Syntax of "find" is not known to me so I am doing a find /mnt/d/bin ,then scanning the screen output with shft-pgup - not too flashy and not too good. find /bin/t* seems to show all files beginning with t in the bin folder, but doing a find /t* or a find /dos* at the mnt/d prompt isn't returning anything. 

Is there a chance anyone would be willing to take the two files in the zip earlier in this thread, use your textpad or dos2unix, rezip them to me? 
Or , where is textpad located on the drive - is it typically on the TiVo disk? is there a doc on how to use it (commands and such) , or will textpad /? give me the syntax to use? 

The cd I am booting on is from about a year ago, when I first hacked the HR10-250:
PTV Upgrade LBA 48 Support Utility Disk version 4.04DD , 5/12/2006
and it has MFSTools 2.0 on it. I also have a weaknees boot CD of unknown age.


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## ARC (Dec 16, 2001)

I am loading the file rx.sysinit using VI.
In theory, if I load it and then save it, will the result be the same as if I used dos2unix or textpad?

I am seeing a ^M at the end of each line - is this what is hosing me up, and what needs to be removed?

Would JOE be more friendly  I find it also is on the system and runs at the prompt??


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## ARC (Dec 16, 2001)

I found a possible solution at 
http://www.iconv.com/dos2unix.htm
which purports to run dos2unix for me. I've created the two files, and am burning them to a cd so I can get them over to the unix box.


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## ARC (Dec 16, 2001)

Having burned the two files to a CD, I now find I can't figure out the commands to mount the CD drive (or else refer to it) after booting on the boot CD. (sound of head banging against the CRT)

hdc is the cd rom drive, hdd is the tivo drive. 
after booting I am at a prompt that I think is the cd drive but when I simply swap the boot cd for the cd containing the two files, I can't get ls to show the two files. 
This must seem so entertaining to anyone who knows linux....


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## BTUx9 (Nov 13, 2003)

linux liveCDs use a ramdisk for root... you have to mount the CD:
http://www.ahinc.com/linux101/mount.htm


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## ARC (Dec 16, 2001)

any suggestions - on how to get these files off of a CD (with no subdirectories) onto the TiVo drive? Apparently once you boot on a particular CD, you can't swap it out to a different CD. This seems incredibly difficult to do what is such a simple thing in DOS....(granted, dos is what hosed up the files in the first place, but at least I could have gotten my TV back up and running again quite some time ago...  ) 

Now going back to trying to figure out how to use JOE to edit out the DOS line endings since I cannot figure out how to migrate two puny files  

Man, this is painful.


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## ARC (Dec 16, 2001)

ok. I edited every single line by hand using joe, to get rid of the blue M which I presumed was the line feed that Window's wordpad added. That did not fix it.
THen I re-edited rc.sysinit to make the debug_board=false, and that allowed the TiVo to boot once again.

Back to the original question - how to force my machine to upgrade to the 6.3d when it refuses to get past the negotiating phase during a phone call... ...?


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## FMK2 (Dec 28, 2002)

There's a reasonable chance that 6.3d is already on your drive -- it was already on mine when I decided to let the box upgrade.

To check for it, get to a bash prompt (telnet or serial) and type this command:

```
echo mls /SwSystem | tivosh
```
 It will tell you if the 6.3d slices are on your system. If the results of that command includes a line that starts with something like "6.3d-01-2-357...", then you just need to enable the upgrade. There are a number of ways to proceed from there...


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## Xtra7973 (Apr 6, 2006)

ARC said:


> ok. I edited every single line by hand using joe, to get rid of the blue M which I presumed was the line feed that Window's wordpad added...


If you want to edit your files on the PC in the future may I suggest using metapad . I use it as im sure many others here do as well and you wont have that problem in the future.


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## ARC (Dec 16, 2001)

Thanks for the metapad suggestions. I'll be sure to use it in the future.

Meanwhile, back at the ranch, I find that having those line feeds has no effect one way or the other on the ability of the TiVo to boot. The self-imposed pain was due entirely to me setting debug-board = true (based on another thread I found up here saying that was the key to getting his box to make the phone call out.

Once I edited that back, using joe on the linux-booted box, it booted in TiVo box just fine. It's funny - I didn't take time to dig into JOE all that much, but what I did find was that it reminded me a lot of WordStar 2000+, a dos-based word processor that used Ctrl combinations for LOTS of things. That took me back 20 or so years ago... ahem..
I never did figure out how to mount the frickin' CDROM to where I could copy the unix'd version of the two files over to the hard drive, so editing the original files in place was good enough, though tedious. 

For my next attempt I'll just use some commercial utility to do the 6.3d upgrade. When I first started this saga, I did note that 6.3a was on the TiVo for upgrading - I just want to bypass it and get right to 6.3d . 
Thanks to those that tried to help.


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## DanInSD (Jul 8, 2003)

I just installed all the software through the "Hacking Tivo" book. While this is not exactly the same as the Newbie guide, it's very similar. 

When I telnet and get a bash prompt, I can navigate to /var/hack/bin and validate it through pwd, but I can't run ls, vi, or other commands. If I'm wired directly to my PC it works fine. 

I've installed TivoWeb and can access it through typing the IP address, but would like to have better control via my telnet session.

Thanks in advance!!!

Dan


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