Has anyone tried souping up a DCT6412 by upgrading its hard drive?
A few mandatory notes to make sure there are no misunderstandings, since these forums seem *very* well read:
(1) I am located in Canada. It is a violation of the Criminal Code of Canada to tamper with equipment to steal cable service (actually, doing anything to steal service is a criminal offence). What I'm doing is *NOT* to steal service, but *ONLY* to allow the DCT6412 to record MORE *legitimately acquired* programming than it can when shipped from the Motorola factory.
(2) I do not want to copy any content off the hard drive for use anywhere else. My only intention is to display the content (more of it!) with a TV connected to my DCT6412. Furthermore, I do not wish to share the content with anyone, anywhere, anyhow.
(3) I do not condone opening a cable box you don't own. I own this DCT6412 (it was purchased outright from my cable company), so I firmly believe I have the right to do this.
Okay, with the legal stuff out of the way, the two DCT6412 units I've laid eyes upon both have a 120GB Seagate 5400rpm "Consumer Electronics"-grade hard drive in them. I replaced the hard drive in mine with a brand-new Western Digital 250GB 7200rpm hard drive. I expected the unit to reject it, because it wasn't formatted (as the unit was expecting it to be, or even at all); it was fresh out of the static bag. However, to my surprise, it seemed to initialize it and use it just fine for recordings!
The attached image indicates that the unit seems to have a capacity of 120 GB hardcoded in its firmware (8.12, if I recall correctly), yet has allocated just a hair over 149 GB to its various partitions. This indicates there doesn't seem to be a 137GB limitation (caused by the 32-bit LBA addressing limit at ~137GB in some older PCs and similar platforms), since the "PVR Content" partition is ~144GB in size by itself. The IDE interface is provided by an ALi M1543C-B1 southbridge, which dates from ~1998, making it ANCIENT by PC standards. (This is almost certainly the same component which provides the box's two USB 1.0a interfaces.)
Why Motorola chose to go with such an ancient IDE interface is absolutely beyond me, other than perhaps that they got a VERY good deal on them (but what would a newer southbridge have cost in volume, really?!)
Extensive Googling has not revealed whether or not the ALi M1543C-B1 component supports 48-bit LBA or not, but judging by its age, my guess is that it does not. However, the attached screenshot seems to indicate it doesn't *properly* do so. The age of ALi's press release (apparently this part went into volume production in Q1 '98) also makes me leery of the device's ability to address more than 137 GB of any hard drive installed in the unit.
I have been a PC technician, consultant, programmer, etc for >10 years, and this sort of stuff doesn't faze me in the least (even mounting the original disk in a PC, poking around the disk in a hex editor to look around). Otherwise I wouldn't be trying it! (One note for the PC-aware: the drive contains a nonstandard partition table -- ending in 0x56AB, somewhat amusing when the "standard" one ends in 0x55AA. No partitions are defined there, but sector 0 is anything but blank.)
However, the unit wasn't stable -- after a few hours of recording HD content with the TV turned off, I would return and turn the TV on, to be greeted by a black screen. The hard drive's heads weren't chattering, indicating it was no longer recording. Pressing STOP then DOWN then OK, which is normally required to stop recording with the Prevue software my cable company uses (which is total garbage, but that's another matter), didn't do anything -- and I wasn't able to change channels or cause the unit to respond by pressing any keys (no menu, guide, or other overlay of any sort). The unit was acting strangely, like it had lost its mind.
After unplugging the unit's power cord and plugging it back in, pressing the "recording list" button indicated no recordings were stored; this leads me to believe the filesystem had become corrupt (or was originally, since that drive was never formatted at the Motorola factory). However, recording 4 or 5 short clips then power cycling the unit did NOT result in the loss of the recordings -- only when the unit "blew a gasket" as described above were the recordings lost.
So, I plan to try again with a brand-new Seagate 160GB 7200rpm hard drive -- first new, then with the image of the original 120GB hard drive copied into the beginning of the 160GB unit (leaving blank space at the end, which ideally would be detected and used).
Any ideas? Thoughts? Others trying this, or thinking about it? Please let me know, either by PM or preferably by replying to this post!
Thanks in advance...
A few mandatory notes to make sure there are no misunderstandings, since these forums seem *very* well read:
(1) I am located in Canada. It is a violation of the Criminal Code of Canada to tamper with equipment to steal cable service (actually, doing anything to steal service is a criminal offence). What I'm doing is *NOT* to steal service, but *ONLY* to allow the DCT6412 to record MORE *legitimately acquired* programming than it can when shipped from the Motorola factory.
(2) I do not want to copy any content off the hard drive for use anywhere else. My only intention is to display the content (more of it!) with a TV connected to my DCT6412. Furthermore, I do not wish to share the content with anyone, anywhere, anyhow.
(3) I do not condone opening a cable box you don't own. I own this DCT6412 (it was purchased outright from my cable company), so I firmly believe I have the right to do this.
Okay, with the legal stuff out of the way, the two DCT6412 units I've laid eyes upon both have a 120GB Seagate 5400rpm "Consumer Electronics"-grade hard drive in them. I replaced the hard drive in mine with a brand-new Western Digital 250GB 7200rpm hard drive. I expected the unit to reject it, because it wasn't formatted (as the unit was expecting it to be, or even at all); it was fresh out of the static bag. However, to my surprise, it seemed to initialize it and use it just fine for recordings!
The attached image indicates that the unit seems to have a capacity of 120 GB hardcoded in its firmware (8.12, if I recall correctly), yet has allocated just a hair over 149 GB to its various partitions. This indicates there doesn't seem to be a 137GB limitation (caused by the 32-bit LBA addressing limit at ~137GB in some older PCs and similar platforms), since the "PVR Content" partition is ~144GB in size by itself. The IDE interface is provided by an ALi M1543C-B1 southbridge, which dates from ~1998, making it ANCIENT by PC standards. (This is almost certainly the same component which provides the box's two USB 1.0a interfaces.)
Why Motorola chose to go with such an ancient IDE interface is absolutely beyond me, other than perhaps that they got a VERY good deal on them (but what would a newer southbridge have cost in volume, really?!)
Extensive Googling has not revealed whether or not the ALi M1543C-B1 component supports 48-bit LBA or not, but judging by its age, my guess is that it does not. However, the attached screenshot seems to indicate it doesn't *properly* do so. The age of ALi's press release (apparently this part went into volume production in Q1 '98) also makes me leery of the device's ability to address more than 137 GB of any hard drive installed in the unit.
I have been a PC technician, consultant, programmer, etc for >10 years, and this sort of stuff doesn't faze me in the least (even mounting the original disk in a PC, poking around the disk in a hex editor to look around). Otherwise I wouldn't be trying it! (One note for the PC-aware: the drive contains a nonstandard partition table -- ending in 0x56AB, somewhat amusing when the "standard" one ends in 0x55AA. No partitions are defined there, but sector 0 is anything but blank.)
However, the unit wasn't stable -- after a few hours of recording HD content with the TV turned off, I would return and turn the TV on, to be greeted by a black screen. The hard drive's heads weren't chattering, indicating it was no longer recording. Pressing STOP then DOWN then OK, which is normally required to stop recording with the Prevue software my cable company uses (which is total garbage, but that's another matter), didn't do anything -- and I wasn't able to change channels or cause the unit to respond by pressing any keys (no menu, guide, or other overlay of any sort). The unit was acting strangely, like it had lost its mind.
After unplugging the unit's power cord and plugging it back in, pressing the "recording list" button indicated no recordings were stored; this leads me to believe the filesystem had become corrupt (or was originally, since that drive was never formatted at the Motorola factory). However, recording 4 or 5 short clips then power cycling the unit did NOT result in the loss of the recordings -- only when the unit "blew a gasket" as described above were the recordings lost.
So, I plan to try again with a brand-new Seagate 160GB 7200rpm hard drive -- first new, then with the image of the original 120GB hard drive copied into the beginning of the 160GB unit (leaving blank space at the end, which ideally would be detected and used).
Any ideas? Thoughts? Others trying this, or thinking about it? Please let me know, either by PM or preferably by replying to this post!
Thanks in advance...