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[ruffrecords]

We just upgraded our old Sky+ HD box for the new Q box so I have this old SKY+ HD box sitting there doing nothing. I checked on eBay and they only sell for about £20 so I am disinclined to go to the bother of selling it. I know they run quite a lot in Linux inside already so I was wondering if I could repurpose it as a NAS box for example. It has a 1Tb drive, ethernet, USB, RS232,  ports. Anyone have any experience of these or know if it can be done?
Cheers

Ian

[Mark Greaves (PCNetSpec)]

I don't think this can be done (or at least not easily), the software isn't on the HDD it's in firmware so you'd first need some method to reprogram the firmware.

Probably best to just salvage the HDD and marry it to a Raspberry Pi or similar via a USB enclosure.

[ruffrecords]

Looking around the web, it seems reprogramming the flash has been successful in other set top boxes using the jtag interface. I took the top of the box and it looks like it has a Molex connector for this. I also discovered it uses a Broadcom chip with a MIPS core so compiling a kernel should be possible.

Cheers

Ian