Pioneer 531H hard drive error = lost everything

[mertens]

I posted my problem at a couple other places, and one person mentioned there was a topic here that might help. I tried a few different searches, but I may not have had the correct keywords. If someone could point me in the right direction to solve my problem, it would be greatly appreciated. Here is my problem:

So, my mother's pioneer 531H had a hard drive error and when she turned it back on, she couldn't access any of her recordings. It's as if the hard drive is blank. She wants to try and save the data. I know it's been done with other models (like Ilo), so I was wondering what to do.

I've told her to stop recording to the hard drive (she's recording directly to disk). As a side question, I was wondering if she wants to edit and finalize dvds, will it be writing to the hard drive at all in a way that will overwrite her "lost" recordings?

Well, my plan is to borrow a friends computer (I only have a laptop). Hook up the pioneer hard drive to his computer. Buy an external hard drive and copy all the files to it. Then place the pioneer hard drive back in the recorder. I can then use my laptop to burn the files on the external hard drive.

If anyone can give me some detailed instructions on how to do this, it will be much appreciated. I need to know things like, when i put the pioneer HD in the computer, do i set it to slave? Do i need to format the external hard drive (maybe partition it) in some way? How do i copy the hard drive exactly). What program can i use to burn the files (I have Nero 6 I think).

Is this even possible with a pioneer or am i screwed?

[FulciLives]

It can't be done. There is no way to read the data from the Pioneer and copy it over to a regular HDD to be seen on a computer.

The HDD in the Pioneer uses a different kind of file system that is not compatible with a computer, or something like that.

It may be possible to buy a replacement HDD from Pioneer and then somehow transfer data from the old one to the new one. However a replacement HDD is very expensive if you are outside your warranty. So expensive in fact that you might as well just replace it with a Pioneer DVR-640H-s or something similar like the Toshiba RD-XS35. Also I have no idea how you would go about copying data from one HDD to the other HDD and that assums that the data on the HDD is still there and recoverable.

Even if you are outside the warranty I would still try to call Pioneer and see what they have to say about all this. There may be a simple way for instance to reset the HDD so you can still use the unit (like a reformat or something) ... but loose what is there now. Still that's better than having a unit that doesn't work at all.

- John "FulciLives" Coleman

[mertens]

Thanx for the response, even though it wasn't what I was hoping for.

I actually just bought her a philips dvdr5344h (160gig) unit that should be coming in a week or two. She had already said she wanted something with a larger hard drive. She's just really sad about losing everything she had and wants to save it if possible. There's some function on the unit that resets the hard drive completely, which would probably allow her to use it like normal without any problems, but she would lose all hope of getting back her "lost" recordings. She had months of soap operas on there she never had time to watch.

[TBoneit]

Storage on a hard drive can not be thought of as permanent. You need to educate your mother to burn it to DVDs if she doesn't want to lose things. I use Verbatim 16X in my 531h. At 28cents a disc it sin't that expensive to save things for later watching.

If she is the kind of person that handles things so they look like new then she could use -RW discs. The biggest problem with rewritables is that they need to be handled carefully so the recording side stays pristine.

The discs I see customers bring in suggest to me that most discs are very poorly handled. I cleaned jelly off of the bottom of a Cd-RW thursday. Even the ones that are clean seem to be scratched. Anything like that will cause poor quality burns with a rewritable disc. Any disc for that matter.

I'd have suggested the 640h just because she is used to the 531h and it would be a very easy transition.

Anyway Good Luck with the Phillips.

[RabidDog]

You could use Linux or a forensic disk program(ghost?) to make a hard disc image. This presumes you have the knowledge to do so and also the amount of free hard drive space for the disk image. Once you have the image you can then work on it at your leisure to try and rescue any files. But, basically, you're ******. Oh yeah you could contact pieinear and get them to fix it for you, jim. They are sure to have exactly the software which runs on windows PCs and can rescue files from the hard drive.

[thewraith]

It is possible to retrieve the video from the drive so long as not to much corruption has accured or the drive is not damaged. This process is not a one click operation.

The video is stored as a PES MPEG2 stream and can be as fragmented as a PC HDD. The first 250mb is for the file system, the rest is video storage

My 531h about a month ago failed after I deleted a video, it just locked up. When I restart it came up with an HDD error and recommended to reformat. I had 174 videos recorded, no way was I going to lose all that. I could still watch but I could not record or copy from HDD to DVD.

So I start to look thru the drive. It took awhile but I started to see the patterns in the HEX. I used a program I have called Winhex and it's scripting ability. The script does its best to extract all videos to another HDD. It's a working progress at the moment. All videos extracted may be full recordings or parts of a recording. The parts may be a result of editting ADs out. So one show with 2 AD breaks will have 3 parts. The script tries to group these together but some times instead of "a-b-c" its "b-c-a". Some videos retreived are previous deteled or messed up clips. Once extracted you could use ProjextX to join and strip out the NAV stream or Cutterman to cut out ADs that still need to be done. At the moment it is not possible to return a video to a DVR-531h drive. All this requires heaps of HDD (NTFS) space for extraction. Aleast 531h drive(80gig) + 50gig and and plently of time (hours+++). I plan to make this available when I iron out a few more bugs in the script. It only does mass extraction at the moment.

So there is still hope so long as you are prepared to do a bit of work.

cheers

[mertens]

I'm not afraid of doing some hard work. If the programs are simple enough to understand, I'd be happy even if it takes a really long time.

Do you think it would work if I copy the dvr hard drive onto an external hard drive? Like I said before, I don't have a desktop computer and won't be able to borrow one for more than a few days.