motorola cable boxes and hard drives

[Dan Ritter]

On Thu, Sep 24, 2009 at 04:32:10PM -0400, John Boland wrote:
> a friend of mine has been trying to copy some stored programming from his
> motorola dct-3412. he took the drive out of the box and attached to a linux
> server (that was a good thing). however, he reports that fdisk didn't show a
> partition type.
> so, for some unknown reason he then put the drive in a windows box (bad
> idea). of course, uncle bill decided to put his own signature on the drive.
> returning the drive to the cable box shows 0% used.
> so, i guess the first problem to overcome is putting the correct signature
> back on the drive. does anyone have any ideas on how to do this? what the
> correct signature is? what is the format of the signature or even where to
> find out what it is?
> once the drive is readable in the cable box we need to get the stored
> programming out of the cable box.  i suggested just hooking up a capture
> card to his linux box and playing back the stored stuff and recording them
> manually.
> other suggestions welcome.
> my gut reaction at this point is that the stored programming is gone.  i'd
> like to be wrong.

I have heard, and have no reason to doubt, that when the Moto
boxes see a new disk, they do a proprietary reformatting of it.
So you can expand them by substituting a new larger disk, but
you can't do what your friend wanted to do.

The content is probably gone.

-dsr-