Accessing external DVRs' HDD & formatting for a larger drive

[videobruce]

This is probably going to be a tough one since it is involving unchartered territory.
There are 3rd party external HDTV recording devices that will work with certain HD TV's that have the HAVi interface and 1394 ports. The use a HDD to record NTSC/ATSC (OverTheAir) & QAM (Cable) material.

This is one device that has promise;
http://www.indigita.com/products/customsolutions/avhd.html

Problem is; price and size of HDD. What I want to know is how would one replace the included HDD with a larger one.

I received a e-mail from Indigita and the relevent portion is as follows;The AVHD drives are specially formatted to maintain the 5C content protection and are not user installable or replaceable........The AVHD is designed specifically for today's new Digital Cable Ready HDTV's.......the AVHD incorporates 5C encryption and is able to record authorized copy protected programming from DCR TV's. What I'm concerned about is the "specially formatted" and the "5c content protection" parts.

Someone else has one of these (a 40GB dealer demo unit) and tried to access the HDD via a USB port. The O/S saw the device but couldn't read it or even show a drive letter. I am going to ask him to put it on a IDE bus and see if that does anything.

How can one figure out exactly what type of "formatting" this uses?

[Paul Komski]

You should be able to read every byte on the "data area" of the drive with a disk hex editor such as WinHex (http://www.x-ways.net/winhex/index-m.html). That might give you some indication of any formatting and file system in use in the data area of the drive.

Seeing that this is "specially formatted" there may well be an ATA HPA (host protected area) outside the data area that may affect your access to the drive.

No harm in reading the data on the drive and then see where you want to go from there or whether you can interpret what you see. WinHex shouldn't write directly to the drive (other than to save any files to a partition should that be desired) unless you decide to purchase it and then enable writability.

[videobruce]

Unfortunately, most of that is over my head.

'Hex' is a four letter word with me.

[jcnoernberg]

I have a ReplayTV brand DVR that I upgraded from 40 to 160GB very easily with a utility available over the net. I imaging that one you're looking at is no different, but finding the utility is the problem... unless you want to write one yourself, but I couldn't blame you if you don't want to :cool: