Panasonic DMR-EH60 hard drive problem (swapping)

[fedet123]

I bought an old Panasonic DMR-EH60 (European) DVD-recorder cheap, with plans to exchange the original Samsung hard drive with a new Western Digital. I found a guide on how to do it, but I have encountered an unexpected problem:
When I mount the Samsung hard drive in an external IDE-USB adapter, the drive won't start up at all.
I also tried mounting it inside a desktop PC, on the IDE-cable, but that didn't work either.
Now I don't know what to do next. I was thinking that maybe there's some sort of signal going from the DVD-recorder to the hard drive on power-up, that triggers it, and then it starts spinning (?). Some kind of firmware that locks this specific drive to the DVD-recorder?
Or maybe I'm way off.

My original plan was to clone the original Samsung hard drive onto a new drive. But since the Samsung drive will only start up in the recorder, I'm stuck.
Any thoughts or ideas?

[DB83]

HDD's in dvd-recorders use proprietory OS. No PC can read them. There are plenty of topics on here about this.

All you can do is capture - in real time - from the recorder to a PC