LG HDD DVD recorder hard drive upgrade / clone

Grant

Grant

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Anyone have any experience with upgrading the hard drive on these units.

A upgrade is a relatively simple procedure, however, I would like to keep what is on the existing drive & move it to the new drive.
With a simple upgrade, the unit will format the new drive.

I would like if possible to clone the existing drive onto a larger capacity drive. If a true clone is possible the recorder should not need to format the new drive (in theory i suppose).

My questions are:
what format is used on the hard drive on these recorders- fat, fat23 etc?
would the unit recognize a SATA drive using IDE to SATA converter plug (the original drive is IDE)
is there any recommended software to use for cloning (if possible)

any ideas
 
It's probably dependent on which recorder model you have - can you post that here?

I've done an HDD upgrad on my RH-1999H recorder - was a 250GB IDE standard and upgraded to 500GB IDE. Very simple swop process after cloning the drive using Acronis True Image/Disk Director.

I don't recall the file format used, but I backed up all the files on the old HDD to my PC by dragging the folders/files across in Explorer, then installed the new HDD in the LG, let it format, removed it and hooked back to the PC and dragged the folders/files back to the new drive.

Not sure about a SATA drive with a converter - don't see why not though...
 
it's a LH-RH3690SE
I am a little confused. You mention cloning with Acronis. You backed up the contents of the old drive to your pc, put the new drive into the recorder to let the recorder format it, then removed it to copy the content from the old drive (now on the pc) to the new drive.
At what point did you use Acronis?

If one simply made a clone of the old drive using Acronis do you think the recorder would want to format the new drive given it is a clone - although of higher capacity?
 
You can still buy IDE hard discs. Just pop in a new one and it will initialise the drive in about 10 mins
 
grantza said:
it's a LH-RH3690SE
I am a little confused. You mention cloning with Acronis. You backed up the contents of the old drive to your pc, put the new drive into the recorder to let the recorder format it, then removed it to copy the content from the old drive (now on the pc) to the new drive.
At what point did you use Acronis?
Click to expand...

Sorry, I should have mentioned the following:
- I used Acronis True Image to clone the drive (or rather make an image of the LG HDD) just in case it all went wrong - the first time doing this I was unsure whether I'd lose any content, so I made an HDD image as well as an HDD Backup (paranoid I know! ;)).
- I plugged in the LG HDD into my PC and dragged all folder strustures and files that were listed onto one of my spare HDDs using Explorer - so I effectively had 3 copies of all files...
- I took the new HDD and used Acronis Disk Director to partition and format, however, this could not be read when I plugged it back into the LG unit - so re-plugged the new HDD back into my PC and deleted the newly created partition, i.e. the HDD was now "blank".
- Then plugged the new HDD back into the LG unit and did a disk format - that way, the LG unit formats to it's specifications, creating the necessary partition and file format structure.
- Once done, popped the new drive back into my PC, and copied all the folders/files back to the new HDD, then popped it back in the LG unit - job done.

That's the full way I did it the first time, however, the second time I swopped the HDD, I just cloned the LG HDD partition to the new HDD, adjusted the partition size with Acronis Disk Director so all space was allocated and popped it back into the LG unit - this was because the HDDs were different capacities - no data lost.

If one simply made a clone of the old drive using Acronis do you think the recorder would want to format the new drive given it is a clone - although of higher capacity?
Click to expand...

Once the new HDD is cloned, the LG unit should not format it - only the partition size would need to be adjusted, which you can do on you PC with Acronis.
 
thanks howardb

That was the exact info I was looking (the second time you did it) for, I suspected there may be an issue regards cloning & partition size.
 
Hi howardb,

Would you be able to share how you managed to copy the files out of the LG's DVD recorder's HDD drive?

(1) What format does the HDD use? (eg. FAT32, NTFS, UDF, etc.)

(2) What is the folder structure that the files are stored in?

(3) And what file format type are the MPEG-2 encoded files stored in? (eg. VOB, VRO, MPG, etc.)

(4) Lastly, does the same apply to the newer LG dvd hdd recorders, like the RH388 and RH589? (I understand from an LG tech guy that the latest models use 2.5" SATA laptop drives vs. the older 3.5" IDE desktop drives.) (ref. http://www.askmelah.com/my-gadget-reviews/2011/3/1/lg-dvd-recorder-rh387h-review.html)


Thanks and best regards,
Stephen
Singapore
 
I tried it a while back on a LG recorder I had - no luck though . This was about 4 years ago
 
johndoe1983 said:
I tried it a while back on a LG recorder I had - no luck though . This was about 4 years ago
Click to expand...

Are you referring to the process of upgrading / replacing the LG's HDD, or the process of extracting video off the LG's HDD?


Thanks,
Stephen
Singapore
 
I have an old LG hard drive dvd recorder. I can record stuff but when I want to view and edit it (cut parts out), it seems to freeze and then loses what was recorded

Any ideas on how to fix this?

I've tried doing the built in format but don't think that it worked as still happens

Must I try replace the hard drive? Is there a special way to format the new drive so that it'll be recognised?
 
phoenix55 said:
I have an old LG hard drive dvd recorder. I can record stuff but when I want to view and edit it (cut parts out), it seems to freeze and then loses what was recorded

Any ideas on how to fix this?

I've tried doing the built in format but don't think that it worked as still happens

Must I try replace the hard drive? Is there a special way to format the new drive so that it'll be recognised?
Click to expand...
If I recall, you can try another hard drive. Delete any existing partitions and let the machine format as needed, per the manual. If the same happens on the hdd, the machine is probably faulty and needs looking at by LG.
 
I've also got a LG HDD / DVD recorder, but stopped using it as the PSU board failed and I also have a Philips model.
@phoenix55 , what I remember about the LG - if you remove pieces of a recording that are too small in length, it then fails and you can lose the whole recording. Sorry, don't recall what the limitations were exactly but perhaps try not making it less than 5 minutes that you remove and experiment from there.

They work well IMO, there weren't many other issues, and if you search around there's some interesting behind the scenes coding that can be fiddled with ;-)

(The Philips model is good but too sensitive, although it recovers well. Doesn't allow combining of files though.)
 
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