reverse engineering

Our PVR/DVD player finally gave up the ghost taking with it a hard disk full of films we recorded from TV that the children want to watch. No problem, right? It's probably just an embedded linux box with some simple file layout on the disk. Well, half right. The disk doesn't have a regular filesystem but it does look like the data is stored as a series of UDF files; presumably this was to make it simple to take a recording and write it to a DVD.

The main problem was hooking up the disk to a computer; all of my machines now have SATA interfaces whereas the disk has PATA. Cue an ancient P-III sitting behind the filing cabinet being pressed into service.

Now, let's see if I can figure out the data format...