Here in the lab I've got a HP/Agilent (the label on the device says HP, but the software on it already carries the Agilent brand) HP86142A Optical Spectrum Analyzer.
When we got this device the first thing I did was opening the case, get to the HDD and take a backup image.
Eventually I'm going to root the thing, by restoring that image and thereby conveniently replacing the bytes in the blocks carrying /etc/passwd (there's apparently no shadow system on this thing) with a password-less login entry for root. If somebody wants to have a go at brute forcing the password (this seems to be one of the ancient crypt based, easily broken entries), here's the passwd entry:
root:z1sH85tcwYkQg:0:3::/:/sbin/sh
Anyway: Until then I'd really like to extract that HDD image into a filesystem I can traverse using Linux or BSD. What would be your approach of choice on this?
The ultimate goal would be to reverse the drivers talking to the spectrum analyzer hardware and maybe implement my own ones so that I could run Linux or a BSD on it.
What does running "file -s /dev/sdX" say?