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[PLUG] directv DVR appliance investigations
Thought this would amuse plug members.
I have directv with their DVR service. The other day the receiver
died, and would not startup. I know these units have a hard drive
inside with an embedded OS, so my guess was the drive died or their
was some corruption preventing it to boot.
I also knew that the original tivo was a linux kernel, so I figured
the directv unit might be similair. Goal was to mount it and do an
fsck. So I ripped open my dvr unit and started playing around.
Using a gentoo live cd I was able to examine the disk. Indeed it had
some bad sectors. But it wasnt a ext linux volume, it was coming up
as FAT32.
So.... I connected the dvr's hard drive to a WinXP machine, and the
dvr drive came up as D: with a volume label and everything. Did a
full Disk Check, and voila - fixed. Installed drive back in DVR unit,
and it loaded up. TV works!
Moral of the story. Directv DVR is not based on a linux kernel, as
some might think. And if you have it, and it dies. Just through the
drive in a PC and do a Disk Check from within MS and force a bad
sector scan.
-john
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