File system on the HD of a DVD recorder

[Lars]

Hi group,

I know this is not a bina fide ibm.pc question, but where else to ask?

I have this Sony DVD Recorder, RDR-HX710 with a built in hard drive,
WD 160 GB. Late one night my fingers where faster than my brain and
rather than reformatting a RW DVD I reformatted the HD, and lost all
the cool stuff I had recorded.

I searched for some unformat command but it had none. So I took out
the HD and plugged it in to an external USB-connected box.

Windows Diskmanager sees the drive but reports it all as
"non-allocated" space.

Do you have any idea what kind of file system such a drive may have,
and if there is any tool I could use to unformat the thing?

Lars
Stockholm

 

[Rod Speed]

Hi group,

Lo groupy.

I know this is not a bina fide ibm.pc question, but where else to ask?

I have this Sony DVD Recorder, RDR-HX710 with a built in hard drive,
WD 160 GB. Late one night my fingers where faster than my brain and
rather than reformatting a RW DVD I reformatted the HD, and lost all
the cool stuff I had recorded.

A Jap would at least have the decency to disembowel itself.

I searched for some unformat command but it had none. So I took
out the HD and plugged it in to an external USB-connected box.

Windows Diskmanager sees the drive but reports it all as "non-allocated" space.

Do you have any idea what kind of file system such a drive may have,

See what a Ubuntu Live CD makes of it.

and if there is any tool I could use to unformat the thing?

Depends on what format it is.

 

[Eric Gisin]

It might be FAT32 or UDF 2.x. Get dskprobe or another disk editor.
Compare a FAT boot sector with the first 64 sectors of the DVR disk.

 

[Franc Zabkar]

Hi group,

I know this is not a bina fide ibm.pc question, but where else to ask?

I have this Sony DVD Recorder, RDR-HX710 with a built in hard drive,
WD 160 GB. Late one night my fingers where faster than my brain and
rather than reformatting a RW DVD I reformatted the HD, and lost all
the cool stuff I had recorded.

I searched for some unformat command but it had none. So I took out
the HD and plugged it in to an external USB-connected box.

Windows Diskmanager sees the drive but reports it all as
"non-allocated" space.

Do you have any idea what kind of file system such a drive may have,
and if there is any tool I could use to unformat the thing?

Lars
Stockholm

I don't know about your Sony DVDR, but this one has a Cirrus Logic
chipset:

http://jeroent.com/salora/?cat=4
http://jeroent.com/salora/?cat=6

The file system is proprietary. I suspect yours is, too.

In the CL case, the file system begins at the topmost LBA and grows
backwards to LBA 0.

- Franc Zabkar

 

[Lars]

See what a Ubuntu Live CD makes of it.

At long last I have had time to dig into this thing again. I used a
Knoppix Live CD but that did not get me any further. It said something
similar to what Windows disk manager says, non allocated.

Here is a screen dump from PowerQuests partition Table Editor;
http://web.telia.com/~u84408784/Avis/PartitionTable_WD.png

It says Type is A3, does that tell you anything?

Here is a digital photo of the contents of sector 1
http://web.telia.com/~u84408784/Avis/Sector_1.png

I have not seen Svend around here in a while. This might be something
for him ...


Lars
Stockholm

 

[mscotgrove]

At long last I have had time to dig into this thing again. I used a
Knoppix Live CD but that did not get me any further. It said something
similar to what Windows disk manager says, non allocated.

Here is a screen dump from PowerQuests partition Table Editor;http://web.telia.com/~u84408784/Avis/PartitionTable_WD.png

It says Type is A3, does that tell you anything?

Here is a digital photo of the contents of sector 1http://web.telia.com/~u84408784/Avis/Sector_1.png

I have not seen Svend around here in a while. This might be something
for him ...

Lars
Stockholm

It does not look like a standard type of boot sector.

Your photo says sector 1 and sector 2, it is sector 0 you actually
want, or am misreading the picture.

PCs typically have the partition table starting at 0x1be on sector 0


Michael
www.cnwrecovery.com

 

[Franc Zabkar]

At long last I have had time to dig into this thing again. I used a
Knoppix Live CD but that did not get me any further. It said something
similar to what Windows disk manager says, non allocated.

Here is a screen dump from PowerQuests partition Table Editor;
http://web.telia.com/~u84408784/Avis/PartitionTable_WD.png

It says Type is A3, does that tell you anything?

That is not a partition table. For one thing, the starting and ending
sectors of partition 2 are located completely within partition 1, and
the ending sector for partition 3 is less than its starting sector.

Here is a digital photo of the contents of sector 1
http://web.telia.com/~u84408784/Avis/Sector_1.png

I have not seen Svend around here in a while. This might be something
for him ...


Lars
Stockholm

I'm not a programmer, but the code that begins "EC 9F CA ..." doesn't
look to me like boot code. But then a DVDR doesn't boot from the hard
drive, and it probably doesn't make any sense to partition it.

- Franc Zabkar

 

[Franc Zabkar]

I'm not a programmer, but the code that begins "EC 9F CA ..." doesn't
look to me like boot code. But then a DVDR doesn't boot from the hard
drive, and it probably doesn't make any sense to partition it.

Hmm, I forgot that the DVDR uP is not an x86 type.

- Franc Zabkar