LG DVD Recorder Hard disk Upgrade

[pchan]

I came across this upgrade guide from the Digital Spy forum.

LG RH7500 DVD Recorder Hard Drive Upgrade
http://www.addison-net.co.uk/dvd/
Upgrade from 80gig to 250gig.

Anybody here try before ?

Has anyone try upgrade LG RH7521W from 80gig to 250gig ?

[Billy THX]

I recently bought a LG RH7521W and removed the 80Gig HD (which was a Seagate and replaced it with a 160Gig Western Digital).

As soon as I switched on the unit I formatted the new drive and works fine so far without any problems.

I am confident that you should be able to install a 250Gig HD in any brand without having any problems.

Hope this helped.

[pchan]

Thanks Billy for your great info. I will definitely try it out.

[yogee]

Thanks Billy for your great info. I will definitely try it out.

Hi!

Maybe it is not the right place for this question, but...

So, I'm wanna buy an LG DVD recorder with dv in connector.
Is the LG DVD recorder is able to receive DV data from PC, like from a miniDV videocam?
I think it is not possible, because i think the PC does not "see" the DVD writter, but is there any app or something to make this?

This will be good, when I download the DVAVI from camera to PC, edit and dub it and via a FW cable if i could send it to DVD recorder, i could
spare time with MPEG2 encoding...

Bye:
G.
ps:apologize about my poor english...

[pchan]

Yes, the RH7521W has a firewire connector for DV camera. You are right. It's not possible to connect PC to the recorder. But, you maybe able to transfer your edited DV back to your DV camera. Then you can transfer from DV camera to the recorder.

[Sam Ontario]

How do you find the LG RH7521W? Is it reliable? Comparison with Pioneer DVR-533H, Toshiba XS34?

[pchan]

@Sam,
Sorry. I don't own either Pioneer or Toshiba model. But, so far, the LG model is doing fine. Have been using it to watch Divx anime.

[Sam Ontario]

Pls write a detailed review if you have time, thanks.

[stackner]

has anyone replaced the loader (dvd burner) in an LG RH7521W with a pc dvd burner? or has anyone tried this with another lg model? i have herd some people have succes with some model dvd recorders and others none. someone with a jvc tried and the player did basicly nothing. i tried with the hyundai dvd recorder and it worked like original apart from when i played back the recordings they would pause/skip every couple of seconds for a split second.

[prodigalzn]

Sorry to bring this up after so long, just found this post after googling.....those of you that have upgraded your RH7521W with a larger drive, did the new drive actually get formatted as an 80GB drive or to the size of the new drive (eg: 160GB) and is the full 160GB (for eg) all usuable?

I have read about bigger drives being formatted to a single partition that is only the same size as the original drive....like an eeprom setting that limits it.

Can anyone provide info?

[handyguy]

"Pls write a detailed review if you have time, thanks."

We keep them at:
https://www.videohelp.com/dvdrecorders

[Ian Sharpe]

Gidday,

to the guys who have replaced hard drives in this model:

By doing this , do you negate the CPRM issue that comes with the original drives if the new drive is non CPRM??

cheers

[stackner]

so has anyone replaced the dvd loader / burner in this unit? the hard drive has normal ide connectors but the loader / burner seems to have connectors similar to what most dvd player loaders now use but the post connectors for the loader looks like a floppy disk drive power connector. just want to know if its possible to replace if/when the loader dies.

[striker9]

I've got a problem with my LG RH-7500: it died.

Now, it's still under warranty, so I'll get it replaced soon, but I'd like to save the contents of the harddrive.

So, I took out the harddrive, which was quite easy, and I hooked it up to my computer using a USB-to-IDE device, but I can't access any files, because fdisk doesn't recognize any partitions on it.

Should I just make an image of the entire drive, and restore it on the replacement DVR, in case it gets replaced instead of fixed, or does anyone know of a way to access files on the disk?

[BJ_M]

use linux and mount the drive or use raw setting in a program like filerecovery pro

[striker9]

How can I mount it if fdisk can't identify the partitions?

# fdisk -l /dev/sda

Disk /dev/sda: 80.0 GB, 80026361856 bytes
255 heads, 63 sectors/track, 9729 cylinders
Units = cylinders of 16065 * 512 = 8225280 bytes

This doesn't look like a partition table
Probably you selected the wrong device.

Device Boot Start End Blocks Id System
/dev/sda1 ? 1 9694 77860864 74 Unknown
Partition 1 does not end on cylinder boundary.
/dev/sda2 ? 1 26 204800 90 Unknown
Partition 2 does not end on cylinder boundary


# mount -t vfat /dev/sda /usb
mount: wrong fs type, bad option, bad superblock on /dev/sda,
missing codepage or other error
In some cases useful info is found in syslog - try
dmesg | tail or so


It looks like the harddisk has no partition table, and only one big FAT32 partition on the entire device, but I can't mount it, because apparently, it's not EXACTLY a FAT32 partition.

Does anyone know if there might be something nonstandard with the bootsector or something?

[BJ_M]

prob. NO boot sector im guessing - just a big fat raw disk

[pingping]

How do you find the LG RH7521W? Is it reliable? Comparison with Pioneer DVR-533H, Toshiba XS34?

I think this machine when using timer recording, you cannot use the chase play function.

[striker9]

It doesn't have a partition table, because trying to mount the entire disk:

# mount -t vfat /dev/sda /somewhere

doesn't work. It's still possible that the disk is still one partition, and judging from the first sector, which has the string FAT32 in it, it looks to be a FAT32 fs. Question is, why doesn't it mount the way I tried?


(/dev/sda because I'm using a USB-IDE interface, so I can connect it without needing to turn off the computer, and have all sorts of time-consuming fun with the screwdriver.)

[BJ_M]

ahhhh -- just like firewire , the oxford and / or ti chipset in the external case doesnt recognize large fat 32 partitions ..


ive had this issue before also with mounting some large drive with ntfs and with really large fat32 drives (i still dont know why windows has a limit on size of fat32 UNder the actual llimit)


i have a patch for oxford firewire


or you have to mount internally on your ide buss

[striker9]

But... isn't that an entirely different thing? The chipset doesn't know anything about partitions, it knows only about sectors, cylinders, and heads. It shouldn't care whether it's a FAT32 partition, an EXT2 partition, or whether I just wrote a file to the device without bothering to create partitions, not to mention filesystems.

It's the kernel that recognizes the filesystems, isn't it?

Or am I talking out of my ass now?

[csign]

You could just image the complete harddisk.

dd if=/dev/(old_harddisk) of=image_harddisk

dd if=image_harddisk of=/dev/(new_harddisk)

It should work if the filesystem doesn't have some foo to bind it to a particular recorder which i doubt is true outside some bought divx's


ps. The operating system of the RH7X00 is VxWorks which has a doslike filesystem called vxext fs. Linux has a driver for it.

[striker9]

Thanks for your useful reply! I have some more comments and questions, though...

You could just image the complete harddisk.

dd if=/dev/(old_harddisk) of=image_harddisk

dd if=image_harddisk of=/dev/(new_harddisk)

That's what I did, only in smaller pieces, due to intermittent hardware failures (reading from a USB2 connected harddisk sometimes gives errors, that can't be recovered immediately. So, when some pieces inevitably failed, I re-retrieved only those pieces.

It should work if the filesystem doesn't have some foo to bind it to a particular recorder which i doubt is true outside some bought divx's

I still don't get what the filesystem's role in copying via dd is, since dd, when used on a partition-file, works on a lower level of abstraction, and doesn't care about filesystems.

ps. The operating system of the RH7X00 is VxWorks which has a doslike filesystem called vxext fs. Linux has a driver for it.

Thanks for that information! It clears up a lot of confusion on my part, since I thought it looked suspiciously like FAT32, yet I couldn't mount it.

I'm using a fairly recent Ubuntu 5.10 (most recent stable version) with kernel 2.6.12, and mount -t vxext doesn't know about vxext, and neither does the manpage. Would I need to reconfigure and compile my kernel to enable it? I'd rather not do that if it can be avoided.

It's not really necessary anymore, but still, being able to mount it would be really useful in the future, if I want to retrieve files from it. Or is burning them to DVD and reading them in exactly as good (i.e. they're MPEG-2 files, and are burned to DVD like that) ?

[csign]

It could be that the files on the harddisk are "encrypted" and will only unlock if your hardware has the right key. It could be that only the buy divx have that feature but it could also be true for ever other file.

I don't think any mainstream distribution has vxext as a buildin filesystem so you should build it yourself

http://www.jens-langner.de/vxext_fs/Documentation/vxext.txt

ps. You could check with head if the boot sector has the magic string "VXEXT1.0"

[LCSHG]

I f any one is intrested in upgrading a HDD to a larger than the orig. You might check out these sites. while not on the LG the Basics should be the same [Normando] has done much work on this

http://www.normediasolutions.com/forum/viewforum.php?f=12

http://www.techolio.com/forums/phpBB2/viewforum.php?f=7

You may have trouble with the last site At presen it is having problems

[striker9]

It doesn't contain the string VXEXT, and from the strings in what appears to be the boot sector, it's probably not VXEXT at all, since that would imply a variation of FAT16, while this data mentions FAT32:

00000000  00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00  00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00  |................|
*
000001b0  00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00  00 00 00 00 00 00 01 00  |................|
000001c0  80 0b 74 51 02 00 3f 00  00 00 00 20 48 09 01 00  |..tQ..?.... H...|
000001d0  00 0f 90 01 00 00 3f 00  00 00 00 40 06 00 00 00  |......?....@....|
000001e0  00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00  00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00  |................|
000001f0  00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00  00 00 00 00 00 00 55 aa  |..............U.|
00000200  00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00  00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00  |................|
*
00007e00  e9 00 00 4c 47 45 49 4e  43 20 20 00 02 00 20 00  |...LGEINC  ... .|
00007e10  01 00 00 00 00 f8 00 00  3f 00 00 01 3f 00 00 00  |........?...?...|
00007e20  00 20 48 09 a5 04 00 00  00 00 00 00 02 00 00 00  |. H.............|
00007e30  04 00 06 00 9a 53 02 00  00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00  |.....S..........|
00007e40  80 00 29 00 00 00 00 56  4f 4c 55 4d 45 4c 41 42  |..)....VOLUMELAB|
00007e50  45 20 46 41 54 33 32 20  20 20 00 00 00 00 00 00  |E FAT32   ......|
00007e60  00 04 00 00 00 00 00 00  00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00  |................|
00007e70  00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00  00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00  |................|
*
00008000  e9 00 00 4c 47 45 49 4e  43 20 20 00 02 00 20 00  |...LGEINC  ... .|
00008010  01 00 00 00 00 f8 00 00  3f 00 00 01 3f 00 00 00  |........?...?...|
00008020  00 40 06 00 90 01 00 00  00 00 00 00 02 00 00 00  |.@..............|
00008030  04 00 06 00 9a 53 02 00  00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00  |.....S..........|
00008040  80 00 29 00 00 00 00 56  4f 4c 55 4d 45 4c 41 42  |..)....VOLUMELAB|
00008050  45 20 46 41 54 33 32 20  20 20 00 00 00 00 00 00  |E FAT32   ......|
00008060  08 00 00 00 00 00 00 00  00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00  |................|
00008070  00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00  00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00  |................|
*

[Clément Igonet]

Striker: what tool do you use to see raw data in your HDD ?

I've succesfully changed the original HDD (ATA type) with an other one (From 80GB to 160GB).

An interesting info: I did not use RH7500 original FORMAT fonctionnality. Before plugging my RH7500 again, I've formatted the new HDD with linux ext2 file system. And it works! VxWorks (if it is really VxWorks system) seems to be able to read this kind of file system.

Under Linux Ubuntu 10.10, I did not find a way to read data from the old HDD. Any Idea ?

[SLK001]

Are you aware of the fact that this thread is 5 years old?

[Geofola]

I have an LG DVD recorder model RH7521W which no longer works. I was told the main board packed up & not worth repairing. I have bought a new LG recorder RH397D. I have data on the 7521 that I want to retrieve. Is there any way of it being transferred to my new recorder or a PC?

I already put this request in two weeks ago & someone was kind enough to reply & say he would check it out for me. Trouble is I don't know how to contact the person so I am starting aghain ( I am not technically minded ). I hope someone can help me. I am based in Melbourne, Australia.

Geofola

[em-t-wallitt]

I have an LG DVD recorder model RH7521W which no longer works. I was told the main board packed up & not worth repairing. I have bought a new LG recorder RH397D. I have data on the 7521 that I want to retrieve. Is there any way of it being transferred to my new recorder or a PC?

This is only a suggestion, since I don't own an RH7521W. You can try using this windows PC utility. Use it at your own risk.

From_hdd_lg_to_pc v1.12

from this website: http://www.ifndef.altervista.org/index_eng.html

You will need an IDE to USB adapter that's similar to this:
http://www.dansdata.com/usbadapt.htm

Unzip the file on your PC.

Have the hard drive connected to the PC through the USB port first before running the utility. Double click the from_hdd_lg_to_pc.exe file. I tested this on hard drives retrieved from an LG RH398H-M and LG LRH-780 and it seems to work.

I don't recommend putting in the RH7521W's hard drive in your new RH397D. I once tried putting a RH398H-M hard drive with recorded content in the LRH-780 and the LRH-780 formatted the RH398H-M hard drive.