Stardate SONY SRV-2000 in Feb 2026
The SONY SRV-2000 was a Sony made Tivo based upon the Series 1 Tivo.
Here in 2026 the Rovio/Tivo Service is no longer available.
In Australia, New Zealand, South Africa, Netherlands there have been, were or still exist substitute emulator services that manage to get guide data uploaded to the Series 1 even though the offical services are long gone.
Historically that emulator appears to have been started in Canada and developed a long time on the Yahoo Group Tivo Canada.. which is long gone. They also used to exist, long gone, CVS repositories to host their code .. however certain repositories long forgotten still exist around the world as of 2026 at least.
Regardless of that.
The SONY SRV-2000 Quantum Fireball Lct15 30 GB hard drive was known to use the ATA extension for SET MAX SIZE in partnership with the ATA Security mode to password protect the hard drive, and even when using a driveutils (Maxtor, the buyout owner of Quantum, and later Seagate the buyout owners of Maxtor) or the qunlock program, resists unlocking.
However it was rather simple to work around since the Tivo would unlock the drive while powered up and only maintaining the power kept the drive unlocked and the IDE cable could be swapped from Tivo to a generic PC IDE bus to gain full access to the drive. To be clear, the IDE cable was swapped from a running Tivo by removing the Tivo IDE cable and inserting a powered down IDE cable connected to a powered down PC, and then powering it online. The PC did not reset the IDE bus and thus the drive did not re-lock itself nor did it need unlocking as done by the Tivo connected to it just moments ago.
This was valuable since the drive unlock code in the firmware could fail to unlock and still continue to run the platform. That is a drive that did not support lock and unlock could be used, the Tivo code merely attempted to unlock the drive and did not care that the drive did not support that feature, so any drive could be used to replace it.
Once imaged the drive could then be replaced using "HDD Rawrite" on to a SATA SSD using a Marvell 88xxx SATA to IDE adapter and placed into the SRV-2000 and booted up. This extends the life and makes it far quieter and smoother.
The drive contents are known to us as an APM or Apple format drive with no MBR or GPT.
Tools such as mfstools 2.0 can read the "byte-swapped" partitions and define the offset sectors of the start of each partition. but the byte-swap order (PPC) means the ext2 root partitions still cannot be mounted and accessed. Tivo Series 1 were based on the byte-swapped Big Endian PPC cpu.
Enter the Silicon Dust nic_cd.iso boot image which can with kernel code brute force the byte-swap order for x86 machines for the /dev/hdb, /dev/hdc, /dev/hdd enumerated IDE drives in a system. If the motherboard has a true IDE port. However /dev/hda is not byte-swapped and hence require jumpering the drive temporaily to "Slave" which a StarTech Marvell 88xxx adapter can do.
If the motherboard has SATA ports, as many late models do, each of those ports used or not will enumerate before the IDE ports in the kernel space and push the actual IDE port far far down the chain of enumerated devices and not work with the nic_cd.iso boot.. /dev/hdi for example. The solution is to BIOS disable the SATA drive support temporarily and only use USB flash drives as bootable media to allow the /dev/hdx space to remain unpolluted and enumerable for the specialized byte-swap kernel enumeration positions to allows mounting with mount -t ext2 /dev/hdb4 for example.
This allows injecting TurbotNet device drivers if a Series 1 9thTee TurboZnet ethernet port board is available, and automatically loads the kernel modules in /usr/lib/modules and adjusting and assigning rc.sys startup scripts that preconfigure the Static IP address, or automatically selecting DHCP for start up (before) the Guided Setup actually occurs.
For someone in the countries outside the US where service emulators still exist, this enables resurrecting a Series 1 Tivo and possibly completing Guided Setup.
