HDD for PVR dissapeared on KDL-40W605B

[Glider80]

Hi,

A friend of mine is using 1 TB HDD drive for PVR recording for a longer time. Few days ago this drive became unavailable, just like it was unregistered from his TV. I think it wasn't his fault, he didn't play with menus and so on. Could it had happened by electrical discharge?

My question: is it possible to re-register this drive but without losing many, many TV recordings?

Peter

[Pascale_F]

Hi Glider80,

Welcome to the Community. You could always try asking Sony Support about this.

Thanks,

Pascale

[Glider80]

Hi Pascale_F,

Thanks for tip. I asked and they answered – it cannot be undone 😞

I'll ask my friend, he's working with discs for years – maybe some mirror copy, new filesystem and then again moving data will work 🙂

[Glider80 · Accepted solution]

Hi,

In some cases it is possible to get back to our recordings. 

I checked that disc. Sony uses kind of NTFS file system on PVR discs. I wrote "kind of" because my Linux doesn't recognize it as a proper NTFS file system. There were some errors but with Win 10 and fixing with chkdsk it went like a charm. I solved  my problem this way:

1) I did backup of all files (normal copy and 1:1 disc image)

2) I formatted PVR disc

3) Plugged disc into TV, registered it and made few fresh recordings

4) Unplugged disc without unregistering and connected to my Windows machine

I noticed some differences between old disc image and the new one.

The old one had one additional CONTENTS folder (with 1970s date!) and a file .device_info_2840a*

The new one had that structure:Fresh PVR structure

So the only thing I had to do:

1) delete these unnecessary folder and file,

2) copy original old structure, but without selfrec.reg

I think this file contains last disc registered data, because binary content was a little bit different from the old one.

3) I plugged disc to turned off TV and all these old recordings were playable!