Hi, I have found a DIRECTTV model HR44-500 Satellite Receiver that has been decommissioned. I have not opened it up. It looks like there is a drive in there. I do not have the power adapter. Could this be used as a computer? I believe if I open it up there is a HDD inside. Please give your thoughts on this if possible.
-Thanks
The drive inside should be an ordinary HDD. Depending on how old, it could be PATA, but more likely SATA. Possibly it could be SATA using an adapter for use on a PATA host. The receiver is a special purpose device, useless for other purposes. I haven’t had the cover off one that I can remember in at least 15 years.
Thank you for your response. I have attached a photo of the devices rear ports to this email. It has rear ethernt, hdmi ,usb and sata ports. It looks like almost a sff computer.
Would I maybe be able to use this as some type of headless machine?
Searching for “DIRECTTV model HR44-500 linux” gave me:
I nam pretty sure that holds also for this box.
@marel Thanks for doing that.
Do you know if coreboot would help with this?
-Seasons Greetings
I suggest to find a web forum or email list dedicated to DirecTV hackers, if any still exist. If you can’t find one, there could be a subforum in one of the FTA (Free To Air - non-subscription satellite channels) dish forums or mailing lists. If what you hope for is possible to do, that’s the place most likely to provide the answer. These receivers almost certainly have firmware specific to DirecTV use, which you would probably need to replace. You would also need a distro that supports its CPU arch, which I seriously doubt comes from AMD or Intel. I think it was last year that I junked the last DTV receiver I remember having.
If you want to play with old devices you can use old tablet PCs with Intel Bay Trail-T SOC and newer:
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