I had to move the hard drive between two TiVos recently. Since it was on DirecTV, I got the dreaded Error #51. Since I couldn't recall what I did last time I got it, I googled it, only to find I needed to reset the unit with a Clear and Delete Everything (C&DE). Turns out that since I'd hacked the TiVo, I had a much easier option that I'd forgotten about.
Sadly, I cleared everything before I'd discovered this much easier option. I'm linking the TiVo forum post from here so that my future self will look at it before I have to go through this pain again. Good thing I saved all the hacks I'd done to the TiVo along the way...
Recovering from Error #51
Hopefully I can easily recover the steps. Zipper sure makes it easy. It also adds the Enhancement Script that's knocking around to do all kinds of useful things. Makes hacking the TiVo way too easy... Normally I would scoff at this script, but it is a good aggregation of knowledge that's hard to come by elsewhere, except sifting through the detritus of three or four different TiVo forums.
Anyway, just random hacking away... Maybe the newer direct tivos can be hacked so I can download HD data again...
Oh, and one other thing: The zipper iso that's created can be booted in virtual box. If you connect your hard drive via a USB to PATA adapter, then you can connect that to the same virtual box. The trick I found here was to create a vmdk that pointed to the drive. When it is /dev/disk1 on my mac, I just do "VBoxManage internalcommands createrawvmdk -filename ~/TiVoDrive.vmdk -rawdisk /dev/disk1" and then connect that using the Storage tab in the config dialog for the virtual machine in VirtualBox. Handy stuff that...
