Anybody know how to overcome Samsung locking the disk drive on a SH897M DVD recorder?

mikewazowski

This machine belongs to my Mum so when it started to play up she was advised to send it back to Samsung for repair. However, she has over 40GB worth of videos on there and was quite understandably reluctant to send it back without having a backup of her videos. Ironically, recording to disc was the fault so there was literally no way of backing up the videos. Being quite IT savvy I decided to purchase a USB HDD reader and intended to copy the files to her laptop the easy way (drag & drop). However, I was stunned to then discover that Samsung had locked down all my Mum's files - well, the HDD inside the recorder was locked down. I tried sharing the files and everything I could possibly think of but wasting over 4 hours on it i decide to throw in the towel. I approached Samsung who were as useful as a chocolate teapot, so I now turn to you - the pros

Does anybody please know how to overcome this HDD lock so I can just copy the videos over to another HDD??

What's worst is that, presumably because I changed the sharing rights of files etc. I cant get them to view on the recorder now neiother. They are there, because the inbuilt file manager shows 40GB worth of files present, but they just dont show as thumbnails like they should.

Many, many thanks in anticipation.

Johnmcl7

This is entirely normal for DVR's, I don't know if it's a restriction they must have to be used in the UK but it's certainly been the same for any PVR drive I've worked on.

What was the drive formatted as? What did you do the files, were you trying to add permissions or have you stripped them?

When working with Sky drives there was a utility someone had written which allowed the drive to be cloned to another, I don't know what format the Samsung drive is using but I'd see if there's a similar tool so you could at least clone the drive then clone it back. Acronis has a sector by sector imaging option which is meant to provide a backup regardless of the original formatting but I've never had much luck getting that to work.

John

Spankey

if you can get the harddrive out you could run a linux pc and try and recover the files thru linux.

agrinnall

Johnmcl7 wrote: »

This is entirely normal for DVR's, I don't know if it's a restriction they must have to be used in the UK but it's certainly been the same for any PVR drive I've worked on.

It's certainly not the case with my Humax Freesat DVR, I can, and do, copy recordings to an external drive through its USB port. What I have found is that it can be a bit temperamental about which USB drive it likes, I have two 4GB drives, which both work fine in computers but only one of them is recognised by the PVR. I also haven't tried a larger capacity drive to see if there's a limit that can be accepted, as it is I can only copy around 1.5 - 2 hours of recording in one go so it can be a bit slow to do a full series.