motorola cable boxes and hard drives

[John Boland]

a friend of mine has been trying to copy some stored programming from his
motorola dct-3412. he took the drive out of the box and attached to a linux
server (that was a good thing). however, he reports that fdisk didn't show a
partition type.
so, for some unknown reason he then put the drive in a windows box (bad
idea). of course, uncle bill decided to put his own signature on the drive.
returning the drive to the cable box shows 0% used.
so, i guess the first problem to overcome is putting the correct signature
back on the drive. does anyone have any ideas on how to do this? what the
correct signature is? what is the format of the signature or even where to
find out what it is?
once the drive is readable in the cable box we need to get the stored
programming out of the cable box.  i suggested just hooking up a capture
card to his linux box and playing back the stored stuff and recording them
manually.
other suggestions welcome.
my gut reaction at this point is that the stored programming is gone.  i'd
like to be wrong.

thanks in advance.

-- 
If it ain't broke, you're not trying hard enough!