Extraction from a "netless " Sony DirecTiVo SAT60

[redmr2]

This is somewhat of a newbie question, but I can't seem to find a 
good answer anywhere else .. even after looking throught the archives.

I have a Sony SAT60 ... 2.5.1, 40gb single virgin system. I really 
don't want to jump into the cost of a TivoNet board yet .. which 
looks to be a royal PITA for the DirecTivo's. I have successfully 
removed the drive and poked around the root and var partitions under 
Mandrake 8.2 and managed to get mfstools to give me a listing of the 
MFS dirs .. and the all important backup .. just in case (compressed 
200mb!)

I recompiled a static extractstream-0.2 to run under the Kaz Linux 
tools cd kernel .. and moded it recognize hdb10 instead of hda10. 
Well, it seems to try to work, but it outputs a "sector signature 
failed" and a sector dump. I'm assuming it's because of the es 
program reading raw Motorola formatted data into Intel backwards byte 
integers thus screwing up all math calcs.

My questions are these:
* Has anyone moded the Mandrake 8.2 "mac.c" and "mac.h" fs/partition 
code to match those of the moded genhd.c? I can do it, but why 
reinvent the wheel. Or how about add a TiVo partition module.
* Has anyone managed to extract a stream from a TiVo disk NOT using 
the TiVo itself .. ie, no httpd servers to get fsid's (can you use 
mfstools mls?), using intel linux, etc...

Am I nuts?

-D