Panasonic E100 DVR: method to restore swapped drive, old recordings?
 

Usually if you swap the original drive with recordings on it, for a new drive, the recorder makes you format the new drive before you can make any new recordings.

http://www.digitalfaq.com/forum/atta...1&d=1558063862

Then if you attempt to swap the original drive back in, the recorder does not recognize it and forces you to format the original drive. It also does not recognize the old recordings you know still exist on that drive.

This is a method to do that:

it does not involve yanking molex power connectors

Simply its been discovered the first few sectors of the drive has a type of transaction log. Its unique and incremented as changes are made to the number and condition of the recordings on the current drive.

I posted this over on AVSForum since a lot of people used to care about Panasonics over there.. but mostly its been abandoned now.

LordSmurf seems much more detail friendly.. so for what its worth.. if anyone needs to do this:

1. Basically I used IsoBuster 4.3.4 to backup (Sectors 0 to 17408) from the current drive to a file .
2. Then used HDDGURU Raw to restore those bytes to a hard drive that has recordings on it.

The E100H has a specific file system on it, the transaction log is stored far above it and buffered from it by a large waste land of zero value bytes.

As long as the transaction log matches the values stored in the recorder nvram it does not make you format the hard drive and reads the hard drives current list of recordings properly.

On a new or different drive it resets or creates a new transaction log, which will never match the transaction log on a previous or older recorder with recordings.

Normally those recordings are lost, unless exported using a tool like IsoBuster.. but they cannot be restored to a playable condition on the current recorder.

But now you should be able to copy the transaction log from a current drive, restore it and playback those recordings as before.

I don't propose this as a permanent fix, its more a proof of concept. There is no one tool to accomplish this or make it "easy" its also not (risk-free) but if your technically competent and confident.. and desperate enough.. it is an option.

update:

IsoBuster can be used to perform the Backup and Restore of the transaction log.. so no other tools are necessary.

Also IsoBuster can completely backup the drive to a file image for safe keeping if you would like to do that before attempting any advanced operations. It can also Clone one HDD to another HDD.

So IB can do quite a lot when working with Panasonics or many other DVD recorders.