doing my hacks on a laptop

[shredhead]

I've been thinking about doing the DTivo hacks on my HDVR2 for awhile now. I only did the upgrade to a bigger drive so far but now I want to add the rest of the stuff since I'll be relocating the TV and other equipment to a spot in the house where there is already ethernet in the wall.

I do not have a spare PC and I don't want to open mine. I do, however, have a USB enclosure where I can put the Tivo drive. The question is... when I boot whatever CD I use to start hacking, will that OS recognize the USB storage device? Does anyone have experience with this?

[ttodd1]

How did you do the bigger drive?

[limonadito]

I'm not sure which upgrades you are looking to do, but I have successfully installed images onto hard drives using my laptop and USB drive while booting from the MFSTools v2.0 CD w/LBA48 support. When I attached the drive I ran dmesg after plugging in the drive and read the device name, in my case it was the only USB device attached so it was sda. If you need to mount it you could use a command like:
mount /dev/sda1 /mnt/tivo

or something similar with /tivo being where you want to access the files. For restoring a backup like I did, I used:
mfsrestore -s 127 -xzpi /mnt/cdrom/tivo.bak /dev/sda

and was successful. Only problem I had was instead of using copykern I had to use tpip since copykern only lets you use hdX drives. I'm wish copykern had the option of using USB devices :(