The Motorola DCT6412 III - guts

That is not true.
The h.d. is crontrolled from the box.
the cable company can do a cold initialization and the box will download all new firm ware and erase everything in the process.
If you shut the box off, and press the ok/sel button, you will get a settings screen,and have several options to go through, like checking internal hd temp, how full the hard drive is, and s/n ratio etc.

I did a lot of hunting on the web and finally found a bit that works.

http://cgi.ebay.com/ws/eBayISAPI.dll?ViewItem&item=250155312072

That was the only correct one I could find. Of course there might be others.

a box with a 3 GHz dual core and 2 gig of RAM. i did test before with a single core 2.8 and a gig. It worked fine but ran a little hot. It ran hot due to it being one fo the first Prescotts released which were notorious for high temps so I can't say that it wouldn't have worked fine besides that. I just wanted a faster machine so I could use it for other tasks.