[aussiemum]

Hi, I hope someone can help me. I have a Pioneer DVD Recorder with 120g hard drive - DVR 720h. We use it to record TV shows and also I had transferred several hours of home video of our children, with the intention of using it to edit then burn onto dvd.

A few days ago, the hard drive reported it had errors and it said to reinitialize, which I didn't do as it would wipe the drive clean. I tried to copy the home movies to dvd but it wouldn't, then it showed the hard drive as empty.

The next morning I switched it on, and it worked as normal, except the hard drive showed only a few hours of recordings, with most of the home videos gone.

I know they would be still there physically, as it has not been written over or formatted.

It is working normally now, but of course I haven't recorded any more. The home movies are very precious to me and I am hoping to maybe transfer the contents onto a small hard drive that I can then install into my computer. I looked on the Internet forums, hoping to find it would be a simple procedure, but was dismayed to find that the DVD hard drive is set up in LInux, and so won't be visible to a Windows computer. I have a friend who is setting up a computer in Linux, to hopefully recover the lost files. Does anyone know of any software that would recover the files? I contacted Pioneer, but they didn't have any suggestions.

I am really hoping someone can help.

Many Thanks
Aussiemum

[arochester]

Please treat what I say with caution!

I would examine the DVD Recorder to see if the Hard Drive can be easily removed. Assuming it is a regular Hard Drive I would put it inside a computer. I would then boot the computer using a Knoppix LiveCD and I would try to examine the Hard Drive.

Knoppix is well known as a recovery tool,which reads a wide range of things, for automaticaly mounting drives and being able to copy off to a variety of storage media. See e.g. "System recovery with Knoppix" at http://www-128.ibm.com/developerwork...y/l-knopx.html and "Knoppix gives bootable, one-disk Linux" at http://www-128.ibm.com/developerwork...y/l-knopp.html