Orphan DirecTV DVR...

Externet

Externet

A friend moved to another state and left me his DVR model HR34-700 to play with; he returned the service card.

What is it useable for, better than a door stop ? Am very capable in electronics re-purposing. There has to be a hard drive, power supply, the cabinet itself is good to house some project... What about the tuner module ?

The first thing to mind without much butchering is to make a archiving hard drive. What else ?
 
You've got a free hard drive. Without a new card zilch. If you're an electronics wiz, you can always salvage the parts (ps, tuner, ram) for a rainy day. I am still using an HR24/500 for my sub. So, you've got an updated model.
 
Thanks.
Fully disemboweled now, put the supply and its 1 TByte sata drive back into the chassis. Will play further tomorrow.

It is made to make difficult opening the cabinet, but I guess I was lucky to find the tricks in a very short time and all went well. Tuner module seems very custom to use it.
 
Tuner is junk in the trunk without the CPU and software to control it, hard drive will have/ may have to be reformatted back to square one, it may take a low level format to be useful for anything else but a drive for a DTV receiver, any programs on it are encrypted by the card that was with the unit, and can't be viewed by any other means.

I use an external hard drive interface to do this, have re-used many a DTV and Dish hard drive for other things, like back ups and replacements for PC's, some of the Dish drives have had to be put back to zero by factory software.
 
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