How to recover a delete file of Pioneer DVR-650HS

[RickS]

Hi,

My wife has just accidently deleted a video of our sons wedding. It had been copied from a camcorder onto my Pioneer DVR-650HS HDD/DVR Recorder. No other recordings have been made since the deletion

Can anybody please tell me if it is possible to recover the file off the HDD, assuming the HDD can be connected to a PC (Windows or LINUX) and the files read

Thanks for any advice here

[orsetto]

There are scattered reports of successful HDD salvage with other recorder brands, but I haven't seen a definitive confirmation on Pioneers. You could try the process most commonly reported to help with Panasonic recorders, and see if that works, however do note removing the HDD from a Pioneer sometimes results in a hardware reset causing the machine to "reject" the HDD when you put it back. If this happens, to reinitialize the HDD you would need a copy of the Pioneer Service Disc DVD GGV1321 Type 2, as well as a clone of the Pioneer Service Remote GGF1381. The 450-550-650 models generally don't have any issue with removing and re-installing their HDDs, but it does occasionally happen.

To salvage video files from the 650 HDD, remove the HDD and connect it to the internal HDD SATA bus inside your desktop PC. If you do not have a desktop PC, only a laptop, you will need a generic USB to SATA adapter cable to connect the Pioneer HDD to a USB port. Once connected, Windows will not recognize the Pioneer HDD since it is formatted in a custom version of Linux. You need to install a hex editor program, such as WinHex or Stellar Phoenix: these will locate and read the Pioneer drive directly.

From here it gets tricky, and if you have no clue about HDD salvage you may want to consult a geek friend. Within the hex editor you need to find the hex string that identifies the first MPEG video file (likely labeled 00 01 BA, etc), then mark off a block containing all the videos until the end of the drive, a little under 250GB. You would then copy all this out to a spare external USB drive, which could take a few hours. Once you have everything copied to the backup HDD, you can put the original back in the Pioneer. You would then use an MPEG file utility to view and work with the copied video files, something like Mpeg2Cut2. I have not personally tried this, I'm just presenting you with the gist of what other people have posted on this question, so I can't give you step-by-step instructions. If you are lucky, the deleted video will appear as one complete file that you can extract and convert to a DVD using PC software like DVDflick. But since these recorders often divide up single recordings into fragments to fit available space on the HDD, theres a good chance the deleted file will be in several pieces that you will need to identify and re-assemble in the correct order. This process is covered extensively in this thread, the recorders discussed are Panasonic but the same general principles should apply to Pioneers.

Unless you are willing to risk destroying the original files, I strongly advise copying the Pioneer data to a backup HDD. Pioneers are twitchier than Panasonics due to the complex hardware matching system they use (necessitating the Service Disc and Service Remote in some cases). It is much safer to attempt recovery from a copy of the Pioneer HDD than the actual Pioneer HDD: one false move, and the file you want could be permanently damaged. At least if you damage the duplicate files on the backup HDD, you have the "last-resort" option to bring the original Pioneer HDD to a hard drive recovery specialist. They charge a small fortune, easily the cost of a new recorder, but they will know how to recover your video safely.

And yes, it is extremely annoying that most DVD/HDD recorder brands didn't think to offer an "undo" or "undelete" function. Pioneer is especially disappointing in this regard, considering the huge number of HDD features they did include and the poorly laid out HDD function menu that makes "Erase File" the most prominent option, easy to invoke by mistake.

[RickS]

Thanks for a most informative reply. I kind of thought that it may have been possible but was not too sure of the processes. I've done normal PC HDD recovery before and know the intricacies of that so am not surprised at the complexity of doing this on the Pioneer. Still I have access to a geek friend so I definitly look at doing this. Might be a while but if I'm successful I'll post it here

Thanks again
Regards
Rick

[Bryan G]

So, where you ever successful??

[RickS]

This was a while back now so lets try and remember. Oh yeah thats right - so embarrassing. I took the unit to work and the geeks and I fired it up. And you know what - the files were not missing at all. What had happened was that there was more than 2 pages of files and the mising files were on another screen. I had never had more than one page of files before so did not pick up on that. It wasnt until I started burning off files to save and then deleting them that these "missing" files turned up.

So a good laugh in the end but thanks for you follow up

[Bryan G]

My DVR is broke, I took the hard drive out and tried many things and now it's back together. I wanted to know if this worked before taking it apart again...

Oh well, guess I'll take it apart and try this.

Thank you very much for replying, didn't help, but I'm glad to hear you didn't lose your files.