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Thread: dealing with a personal video recorder hard drive.

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    dealing with a personal video recorder hard drive.

    I was hoping to borrow the hard drive out of my personal video recorder or PVR, . I found out that it's LINUX and formatted in a very strange way.

    The file system is LINUX ext2 and half the drive appears to be unformatted. I've downloaded the necessary program to view the files that are on the hard drive at least the formatted portion. But it's totally baffling me this raw partition. It's a 250 GB hard drive, and 132 GB appear to be a raw unformatted partition.

    I was hoping to copy the data and may be the programs I had recorded and also use the drive something out for a bit, and then return it to its original state and put it back in my set-top box. But it's so weird it's got me very unsure.

    In case anyone's wondering, that unformatted partition really looks like it's unformatted, the LINUX software I downloaded should all the various format options and it clearly shows it is just a raw partition. Gparted boot disk shows the same. Any thoughts?

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    Senior Member watercooled's Avatar
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    Re: dealing with a personal video recorder hard drive.

    You don't really have a way of knowing if it's formatted or not, for example it could be an encrypted partition. As for why they'd split the drive 50/50 like that I don't know. One reason could be if they advertise it as having a smaller hard drive but the can't source them any more so they buy bigger drives and just use half of it. Sounds pointless but companies do do it. Can you see any information on HDD space/usage on the PVR itself?

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    • Anteries's system
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      • i5 2400 3.1mhz
      • Memory:
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      • Samsung f1 1tb
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    Re: dealing with a personal video recorder hard drive.

    Interesting thought about it being encrypted. It's quite a basic model, it claims to be 250 gigabytes. The firmware is quite basic and there are very limited options. All it says is that I am using 55 percent of my storage space. Part of the reason I took out the drive, use I was hoping to copy across hundreds of radio programmes I have recorded. To delete them, because there is no format option of a hard drive, and each recording has to be painstakingly deleted one that time.

    I think this is a bit beyond my skill ability, to do anything with the drive.

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    Senior Member watercooled's Avatar
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    Re: dealing with a personal video recorder hard drive.

    I got a "Wharfedale" one from Argos as a gift a while ago and while it's been used a fair bit the interface leaves much to be desired. I've been pondering replacing it with a HTPC running Mythbuntu or something similar when some AMD Fusion boards become available.

    You might try using Testdisk/Photorec to scan the raw volume - Photorec can recover stuff from badly damaged partitions with ease. For example, a friend had a big Truecrypt volume with a fair bit of (not backed-up) data on it. One day he mounted it and it looked empty, I suggested Photorec which recovered everything.

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    • Anteries's system
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      • Memory:
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      • Operating System:
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    Re: dealing with a personal video recorder hard drive.

    Thanks for the software suggestion, I downloaded it and I'm going to have a play. I use truecrypt quite a lot myself and it looks like a useful in the bag.

    I think the media centre direction is a great idea, however I had a Humax PVR a couple of years ago, and the interface was an absolute dream. They are probably even better now. Had loads of little features like a button to press and the program would jump forward the time distance you specified. I actually used to transfer movies and radio to my PC through the USB cable. Though it was a bit fiddly, but there was loads of Internet support.

    But media centres are so tempting now, with the Iplayer and Internet support, streaming etc

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    Re: dealing with a personal video recorder hard drive.

    Oh I don't doubt PVRs can be good, just my limited experience hasn't been anything special. The other one I've dealt with is the Virgin Media one which suddenly stops responding to the remote control and behaves, err, weirdly sometimes. I think it's a problem with the model though, it happens to my mate's one too.

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