Hacking the Salora HDD2510

I wondered what would happen when I insert another hard disc into the HD recorder. Using an old IDE 2 gigabyter I restarted the Salora. It remained in its boot sequence (blinking HELLO on the display) forever. Aha, the drive must be jumpered to master-mode. Now during booting, it makes a formatting-like noise. After a while, the boot sequence completes, and YES, the disc is ready for use.

Conclusion: if you want to use another hard disc, just put it in!

To remove the hard disk you don’t have to remove the entire top cover. There’s a small door at the bottom behind which the drive is located. It also has a warranty seal. When connected to a PC (I’m using FreeBSD), fdisk shows that there’s no valid partition table on the disk. Let’s see if there’s some text:

# cat /dev/ad3|strings|less

Amongst the output we see


CRedundantABS
Copyright LSI Logic, Inc. 2004
CLsiPMABS
Copyright LSI Logic, Inc. 2004
TFS2


Is TFS2 the name of the file system? I did some googling, but no luck.

Further on the disk, the names of the recorded videos appear.

Let’s see what’s inside the Salora HDD 2510. Byebye warranty…

The 250 GB hard drive turns out to be a common IDE drive. The CPU is hidden behind a cooling plate.