I have series 1 and 2 Tivo boxes gathering dust after finally getting fed up with them. I was at first considering salvaging the HDDs for other uses, but then realised that all other components would go to waste. Not to mention the lack of resale ability if the Tivo OS is no longer in tact. I once again I no idea what I am talking about but would love to rejuvenate my old boxes.
Any help would be greatly appreciate.

no

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Have a question search the forum and have a look at the KnoppMythWiki.

Xsecrets

Ok, better question. Aside from huge paper wait, door stop, or any other cutesy answers, is there any use at all for a Tivo box minus the service?

Is it possible to do? Yes.

It would however, be very very hard. Tivo has tons of proprietary hardware in their boxes that does all the mpeg-2 encoding & decoding. You would have to write drivers to use that hardware to have a working machine. Good luck.

By the time I have sufficiently learned enough about program to do this myself I will have already sold both boxes on ebay. *sigh*

He would also be severely limited by RAM. 32MB isn't much. Certainly not enough to run Myth.
When I retire my Tivo1, I'm going to put the original HD back in it and eBay it. Unfortunatley, I opted for the yearly sub, and didn't do a lifetime sub on it. So it's of little use, really.
Although, in 20 years, it may be worth something as a pop culture icon. Maybe somebody will buy it from me and mount on the wall of a TGIFriday's.

A digital VCR. Just because it doesn't have the service or "TV Guide Service" as i like to call it, it just becomes a digital VCR. You still can tell it when and what channel to record on, or pause live TV.

I tried that with my series 2 and the way it acts when plugged in is that you need to have service just to have it in the room. I set it up for a manual recording a while back but it yelled at me. I don't know if the series one behaves the same though. I'll try it out.

If you are determined to have that thing work your best bet would be to remove the internals and replace them with one of the EPIA mini-itx motherboards. You can get those for a decent price, add some ram, a hdd, and a tuner card and you're good to go.

That kind of job is not for the faint hearted though. Check out www.mini-itx.com for some inspiration/motivation and ideas.

You'll waste so much time trying to get this to work that it'll be more efficient to get a second job, work a few weeks and just build a new machine for $400.

Just give your old Tivo to a tivo-less family member...or keep it around for an extra manual recorder when you want to tape multiple shows in the same time slot.

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Currently running: R5.5, HD5000 x 2, PVR150, Athlon 64 3000+, Chaintech VNF4, 1GB RAM, 2 x 250GB in LVM, MSI NX6200TC -> AA 9A60 -> HDTV