DVD recorders hard drives

[FarmerPug]

They just gave the refund and didn't ask for it back.

[FarmerPug]

The pluscom aluminium enclosure arrived today, i plugged it into the old dell it did a bit of installing new hardware but it won't show up anything in my computer?

[lozz]

drives.JPG

if you click on computer, in the programs

what does it show as the drives ?


this is a snip of the pc iuse

if it shows on the list, right click on it and see if you can get into the hard drive that way

[FarmerPug]

I read the manual it says the small minidisk has drivers for windows 98 only. mac 9.8 and higher is compatible, and XP doesn't need anything.

But when i plugged the thing into the mac i got this message:

initialise brings up disk utility:

but there is no more options there except for erasing the whole thing.

When i plugged it into the dell it said installing new hardware, then it said all was successful, but no new drive appeared in my computer.

I plugged the hard drive back into the dvd recorder just incase it blew up, but everything is still there and playing:


The hard drive is a seagate db35.3 160gb, the instructions said set the jumpers to master which has also been done but even with it on the same setting as the recorder the same lack of responses from the computers happen.

[lozz]

You need aprograme mate,
thatl allow you to Rip files from the hard drive,

the hard drive you have is just desighned for dvd recorders and sky boxes,
wont work in a pc,

you need a programe, something like this linky http://www.skycopyplus.co.uk/

[highlander]

It's a standard IDE hard drive; there's nothing proprietary about it - if he didn't want to keep any of the stuff that's on it, he could put it inside a standard PC, boot off the Windows install CD, and the hard drive would appear as a drive containing an unknown filesystem - Windows would then give him the chance to repartition the drive and reformat it using standard Windows NTFS. Same goes if he stuck it in his Mac and tried to partition the drive using Disk Utility; it would first appear as a drive with an unknown FS, but he could still partition it and format it to his heart's content. The only problem with this is that he'd lose everything on the drive as a result.

The filesystem is what marries the drive contents with a particular operating system - NTFS is Microsoft's proprietary filesystem, but you can get a driver for MacOS or Linux to let you read from (and possibly write to) an NTFS drive. Likewise, for Windows and Linux you can get a driver that lets that your OS read (and maybe write to) an HFS (Apple's FS) drive, and for Windows and MacOS you can get a driver that lets your OS read/write a Linux EXT2/EXT3/EXT4 FS drive.

My guess is that this hard disk recorded is based on an embedded Linux kernel, and therefore will use the EXT2/EXT3 filesystem for its hard disk drive.

Try downloading EXT2 IFS for Windows from this site: http://www.fs-driver.org/

Install it on your Windows system, connect the drive to the PC, and I reckon the drive contents will be revealed. No idea if you'll be able to do anything with the files themselves though, it depends what file format they're recorded in - if it's a proprietary format designed by the people who built your hard disk recorder, you might be a bit stuck.

[FarmerPug]

I installed that program:



But still had no luck in it recognising anything:

the computer does know something is connected though:

[highlander]

OK, doesn't look like it's an EXT2 filesystem on the drive then; the software recognizes the drive but can't see any partitions on it (Windows' own "Disk Management" utility would probably report the same thing).

This at least shows that the hard drive itself is indeed a standard IDE hard disk drive; the OS is able to see that it's a 150GB drive unit in the USB caddy.

EDIT: From what I've just read, it seems that the operating system and the disk filesystem on the Toshiba hard disk recorders is not Linux-based and is entirely proprietary. You're a bit buggered unfortunately

[FarmerPug]

don't worry i can always do it the way it advises in the book, just burning everything individually.
Does other recorders allow you to plug their hard drives into computers? Is there any way around toshibas proprietary stuff?

[highlander]

don't worry i can always do it the way it advises in the book, just burning everything individually.
Does other recorders allow you to plug their hard drives into computers? Is there any way around toshibas proprietary stuff?

Depends on the recorder - some of them are Linux-based, and use the EXT2 or EXT3 filesystems (which should be readable using that EXT2 IFS For Windows application), some are proprietary.

The only way to get that drive to read straight into a Windows or Mac system would be if there was an application like EXT2 IFS For Windows but reads Toshiba's FS instead. And I don't think Toshiba are likely to produce one. It's also not likely that anyone else will reverse-engineer the filesystem standard given that Toshiba have pulled out of the hard disk recorder market.