Greetings, I found this board searching for users of this dvd recorder. I have mine for a month now, the disc is half full, so i decided to burn some dvd's. After editing, which seems to work fine, i choose high speed dubbing for a transfer to DVD-R. but my recordings seemed not to be suited for high speed?? So I had to do it in SP, which means 2hr burning for a 2hr programme. My recordings are in SP-mode wich is far good enough for Tv shows. Has anyone got this experience... Thanks
I had the same initial problem with my E85H. You first have to enable HDD high speed dubbing and do the initial recording to the hard disk with it enabled. If you didn't enable it before recording then it will not work. Just enable it now and future recordings will work at High Speed. Could you answer some questions for me? When was your recorder manufactured? Also try a 1 minute recording using the "VCR+" key and have the recording start say 5 minutes later. See how long your recorder actually records for. Mine adds 1 minute to everything. I think that their is a problem with the firmware that needs to be fixed. If you setup your recorder to record a 2 hour SP recording to the DVD it doesn't work....putting the recording instead to the HDD. Same with a 1 hour XP...because the recorder for some reason adds a minute...which makes the recording unable to fit. I hope they fix this. Michael
Some corrections to the high speed dubbing query. If the single recording will fit onto a DVDR, it will high speed dub. (Which is just a burn like on a PC) If you have more than one file to dub, they must all be recorded with the same mode, this includes FR mode as long as the minutes set to FR mode are the same for each file.
Thanks for the info, I will look up and change the settings for future recording. Where is the manufactoring date located? I found the serial number on the back (KW40A003720) I don't see the problem when a recording is one minute too long, you can always edit to obtain a correct beginning or end. I will do the test sometime and let you now.. Greetings.
Thanks for the info too. I had the same problem. I also have the E100HS. That problem wasn't not existant on the E100HS.
I have not seen the problem with the recorder extending the recording times. In fact I usually add a couple of muinets to the begining and the end tomake sure I get everything. Then trim it down to fit the DVD. Works great! [bold]I have a different problem.[/bold] Does anyone know what kind of file system the hard drive uses? My drive was almost full and I was doing some editing to free up some space. the machine locked up on me! After waiting an hour I finally turned it off and restarted it. Now it goes through the self check and comes up with a U99 error. Reseting it according to the book did not work. Tech service was no help. I have some programs I do not want to lose on that drive. I have already put a different drive in the system so I can keep using it and hooked the old drive up to a W2K box to see what the drive had on it. It didn't recognize the file system. (I'm not sure if the file system was damaged when the system crashed or if it is using something else) Sorry for being so long winded, Any help or Ideas would be apreciated.
That's interesting! Is it really a standard IDE drive, I guessed the file system would be different than FAT or NTFS. But maybe it is possible to replace my drive for a bigger one?
It is a standard IDE drive. I put in a 160 Gb drive but it only gave me slightly more recording time (About 2.5 hours more at LP mode) Not the 10-15 hours more I expected. I wonder if there is a jumper or software switch to tell the unit how large it is? Or might it be running into the size limit that some of the older systems have? Isn't that at about 130 Gb? Just a thought
I tried a 250gig drive and only got 57 hours.. same as the 120gig. I have some bad news about the "file system" that you might want to confirm. A test I did indicates the "file system" is might actually not be on the hard disk, but possibly on the motherboard ! I used 2 blank drives. After formatting and recording a test on disk 1, I inserted disk 2. It wanted to format so I did. Then I re-inserted disk 1. It wanted to format disk 1 !. Another test was to record on disk 1, then put in disk 2, which was already formatted. It wanted to format it again ! I replaced disk 1... its program was still there. Altogether I have had 4 U99 errors.. always during a divide. One of them happened the first day I used the unit. I returned it. The replacement worked for a month before I got the U99 there. After I empty my current drive, I will swap in the original Samsung drive... maybe it will allow a format and function again. It also does not like the Fuji 8X discs which are frequently on sale.
I think that there must be something reading the drive and it knows when it has been changed. Some kind of weird copy protection. Not sure. It would be interesting to see if you record a set of shows on drive one then remove it and then record different shows on drive two would you be able to swap drives back and forth and keep the programing. Or if you would get the format drives message. I have found that the unit can be very picky about disks. I have bought some very cheap disks that the unit loves. Lately I bought some Memorex 2x disks (Didn't realize they were 2x at the time)and they worked great (But slow) then I found some Memorex 8x disks on sale and the write crashes on every second or third disk. Go figure???
Thanks Guys for the info on the drives! You kept me off experementing, at least the 10 months warranty i still have ) I use Verbatim 4x discs without problems, Don't think I'll go trying cheaper brands..
Dazed, that is exactly what I did. I recorded on 1, it insisted on formatting 2. If I did format 2, it didn't recognize programming on 1. If both were formatted, and 1 was recorded on, it would not see 2 as formatted, even though it was. Programs on 1 were inaccessible after formatting 2. So the next test involves swapping drives between 2 units, using 1 drive that has been formatted by both.
I thought that the E85 would only work with an identical drive, which led me to beleive that the drive specs were on the board BIOS. My NZ version has an 80Gb drive, can I add any 120Gb? It looks like the 137Gb limitation may be an issue from the posts here
The Best Buy service center managed to clear my U99 error code without wiping the hard drive. But after a few more hours of editting and burning dvds, it came back. The worst part is that the tech who serviced it wrote "after re-initializing unit" there was no hardware error, so they wanted to charge me as if it was a false alarm! The manager over-rode that charge (24.95), but it would have been worth it if the tech had given me the re-initialize procedure.
Did you have to leave your unit at Best Buy to get it fixed or were they able to fix it right away? Mine is being used almost every day and I hate to take it offline for any length of time. Although I may be in trouble putting the drive back into the unit, if it wants me to reformat it. I'll have to make sure to get everything off of the 160 Gb anyway as I don't want to leave that one in the recorder since I'm not getting anything extra.
I have 3 units. I got the service plan on the second one, and bought the third one while they were working on the second one. They sent it to a regional center. It took a week. It was broken (U99) again in 6 hours. I'm going to ask specifically for the re-initialize instructions when I have time to take it back in.
@E85H: have you got a service manual? I'm also interested. There's got to be a hidden service menu... I work for a repair shop that does JVC, so i got access to all JVC service data.. Still i bought the panasonic ;o)
A little update on my drive problem. Ran EZ Disk Recovery Pro against the disk. It took 12 hours but I think it found most if not all of the files. Now I need to clean up a second hard drive to copy the files to, It will not try to rebuild the directory on the same disk. I'm also backing up all the files on the current drive in the Panasonic. (I wish this thing could use DVD-RW's DVD-Ram is so expensive) When that's done I'm going to take the drive and put it on the computer and see if it will read the new drive. If so, then I'm going to try to copy the files back to the new drive and see if they apear in the menu of the Panasonic. The file structure on the drive looks interesing as well, I'll take some notes and post them here if anyone is interested.
Good Luck Dazed, I haven't been able to get it to recognize a drive that that was in it once another drive has been used. Does that program actually give you files that you can copy ? Does it run on Windows on drives that aren't recognized ? And where did you find it ?
