For those of you who are seeking to upgrade your TiVo, and are seeking information as to how to perform such a task, the internet is ripe with information. What is harder to find but just as useful is the answer to the question of what can go wrong, and perhaps, what more could be added to what you have read online.
My first warning is not to increase your TiVo storage by adding another hard drive without first backing up and them expanding your archive on the new hard drive with the -s 127 option. This will expand the amount of swap space on your new larger hard drive. Do not do what I did and just throw in another hard drive, blessing it. Why? Well, if you do not, the most likely possibility is that your TiVo will start crashing more and more over time, as it cannot handle processing the larger capacity of your hard drives in the memory of your TiVo, and without the swap space as backup, bad things happen.
With this first bit of learning, I set my feet on the path of a true, powerful upgrade... adding networking capability, repairing the crashing, and speeding up the aging device.
Part 2, network card etc.
After some careful research, I set out to buy the TiVo CacheCard from 9th Tee Enterprises. I also had to buy some RAM, in my case, 512 MB for just under $100. Yep, in a few years someone will read this and laugh at how expensive it was, but believe me that in todays market it was a pretty damn good deal! I then properly removed the hard drives, backed the data up on a linux machine, installed the cachecard drivers from the site, as well as the TivoFlash utility (in my case from an older build, because the most recent drivers caused a failure in the drive), and placed the new drives carefully back in the TiVo unit. After some careful working in the tight space, I reassembled the case and plugged it all back in!
Green Screen of Death
Yes, that what came next. A most unhappy me seeing the "GSOD". However, after some thought it occured to me that TiVo wouldn't come up with such a thing unless it was surprisingly common, so I went back online, and the "GSOD" only apparently means that there were some file corruption issues that TiVo was repairing, and that things should be back to normal within 15 mins to 24 hours. Sure enough, when I returned downstairs to check on my TiVo again, it was playing TV like nothing had happened!
Playing with the new installation
The first thing I did was the ",#401" prefix to test the TiVo dial up over the network. And it worked! No more POTS for the TiVo! Yes, I do plan on switching my POTS to an internet phone, and TiVo was my last holdout. Now no more baby bells! The second was to telnet into the box and "peek around". Again, no problem. And the navigational speed of my TiVo is "zippy", or another way of saying it was that it is not the happy side of fast!
So what did I install on my TiVo? First, I installed the tivo-bin.tar.gz files in /var/hack/bin. That gave me all the linux commands I needed with the possible exception of a good text editor... yes you have to ftp for now! Second, I followed the advice of this site for downloading your TiVo programming to your mac to burn to DVD from this web page. Now, if there ever is a crash again, I can determine the cause from the logs, edit my TiVo online, and overall have a very enjoyable time with it. If you have any questions in your own upgrade, feel free to email me. Glad to help!