Need HDD upgrade advice for panasonic

[kennywally]

I have

DMR E95
DMR E100

Both are still working, I use the 95 more than the 100 due to the visual layout.

I'm just planning ahead here.



I'd like to double the drive size if I could. Has anyone done this?

Is there a drive size limitation?

Can it be overcome? Is that limitation in an eprom?

Anything I should look out for during disassembly?

[kennywally]

wow!!!

no adventurers, eh?! lol

What about the hdd, I'm thinking I better format it fat 32 so if it needs to go fat16 whenever that fateful day shows up that I install the drive and are ready to rock n roll...., it should be cake...

[jjeff]

From everything I've read about Panasonics, you cannot upsize the HDD. It's hardcoded in the machine and I've never read of anyone cracking how to do it. The + side is apparently if you find a similar drive (can be larger but the DVDR will only use the size of the original drive) all you have to do is install the new drive and when you power the machine ON it will ask if you want to format the drive. You answer yes and the machine downloads info the the new drive and wala, you've got a new drive.
Your '04 E-95H(with 160GB HDD) and '03 E-100H(with 120GB HDD) should be similar although it may be tricky to find a drive similar to what's in those older machines. I don't know offhand what type of drive they use, you'd have to take them apart and look, then scour the internet for places selling that type of drive.

[kennywally]

yeah I already bought them, I just have too much other stuff to deal with first

And thx for the info on the formatting...I kinda figgerd it was on a chip and a self auto formatting type deal...I was just concerned from a prior incident...where I spaced out on formatting the drive and changed it from fat32 to ntsf or vice versa, I forget which, and I ended up losing a bunch of the volume, like from 200g to 80 and at the time I had no idea how to recover it, even the techs at maxtor were stumped, none of them thought to tell me to just repartition the drive to the correct type with another puter and all will be well....that thing sat for a long time before it finally dawned on me.....gotta love that learning curve...hahahahahha

anyways, even tho it will auto format, I'm gonna make it fat32 before I install, because it probably is ntsf, and I'd just feel better, knowing I did that part...if I was feeling adventerous, I'd stick the ntsf in it to see if it would handle it all on it's own.....

[kennywally]

I sure would like to flash the eprom from the better set [ 95 ] to the older one [ 100 ], cuz the better one gives a bit more control over editing, in fine editing mode, and enables the remote to go to end of file to clear off any thing at the end [ where I usually take off a minute or two, but have to fast forward to get there, it won't let me use end of file command [ >>| ]

but it could be a different typs of chip too...no way for me to know...I'd need help from a super panny geek on something that deep....but the 100 only burns 6hrs and the 95 burns 8hrs, so there is def at least some software differences if not some hardware limitations to go with

[classfour]

The old pannys may not want to do what you want them to, but they do what they want very well. I never had one with the HDD feature, and kept an old DMR-E20 (OLD, OLD) and DMR-E55 - while selling off a newer model (not built as well - seems they get lighter with each model). I hardly use either, relying on a Hauppauge capture card for the mule work.

Good Luck

[handyguy]

I have a nice one, a e500 it comes with a 400 gig hd. That's one way to get a bigger HD.