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I boot from external drives to do troubleshooting. You need to enable USB and make it first in BIOS. Then, attach your external drive and boot. Here is some more info. It talks about thumb drives but I don't see anything different than what you do for an external drive.

There's a really good guide at http://www.weethet.nl/english/tivo_dtv2_hacksleepe r.php. I was just looking at it last night, and it's quite complete. I have a Series 2 Standalone TiVo, and plan on upping the hard drive space and installing a hack to extract video unencrypted.

Upgrade your Series 2 DirecTivo to the 4.x OS and you'll get most of what you'd want or need on your $99 Tivo box without having to shell out for a new system.

There's excellent documentation on how to do this over at Weethet Tivo 4.x for DirecTivo. It'll cost you about $25 for the OS and toolkit.

This hack will open up the Home Media Option functionality which allows you to serve up music, images, movie listings, webcam images, podcasts and more through your Tivo from other servers on your network. Why dedicate a much more expensive server to be a media center when you can just stream it through your Tivo box? To get output to your TV you have to buy pricy tuner cards / video cards to replicate the basic Tivo functionality. Then you have to muck around configuring it all to make that Tivo equivalent functionality family friendly. Your time is better spent adding functionality to the open source JavaHMO app you'll run on other boxes on your network to serve up all those extra goodies. A side benefit of the hack is that now you can put on TivoWeb(plus) and other apps on the box to allow you to control it over the web; and you can even stream out recorded shows to PCs.

The only drawbacks I've found so far are that 1) the channel locking functionality appears to be broken so I can't lock the kids out of Nickelodeon, and 2) JavaHMO is a little buggy so it intermittently isn't able to retrieve some images and web pages.

But the menuing system into my 1000+ songs works great and we've been using that a lot since the hack. Plus the USB 2 driver update allows me to pull down shows 4-5x faster than before.

Here's my challenge to the computing world: Find me a DOS version that supports USB hardware, and a USB storage device that can talk to DOS over said hardware, AND that I can boot DOS from if I need to, and I will consider giving up floppies.

Google search string: "dos boot usb"
http://www.bootdisk.com/usb.htm
http://www.weethet.nl/english/hardware_bootfromusb stick.php
http://www.oreillynet.com/pub/wlg/5735
http://club.cdfreaks.com/showthread.php?t=141064
to post a few...

I do this all the time in the engineering lab to run DOS utilities without floppies or hard drives and still have enough room for a decent sized log file collection.

Where should I send the consulting service fee invoice? ;^)

Also, you can't boot of USB keys, so a floppy drive is pretty much essential for the purpose of running stuff like memtest86.

Your Google is weak, grasshopper.

It is fairly easy to hack this modem and change it into an ADSL-router + DHCP server.

I've done it 10+ times for friends and i never had any problems. I can seriously recommend this hack. A router for the price of a modem! ANd much more practical than setting up an old 486 linux-box as router. The modem doesn't run linux, but you can do portforwarding etc.

Remember: you have to know what you're doing and this stuff will certainly void the warranty. I've also never tried this hack with a thompson-branded modem.

a few howto's:

• http://www.firstdbasource.com/alcatel.html
• http://www.weethet.nl/english/adsl_mxstream_alcate lhack.php