Hey guys, I have an Scientific Atlanta 8300 HD PVR which currently has an internal 160GB IDE hard drive, and I've also connected a 500GB sata hard drive via the esata port on the back. I've been running this setup for a few years now without any problems at all, the 2 drives work great. What I'm trying to do is remove the 500GB hard drive, and replace it with another (different model) 500GB sata hard drive (testing purposes). I would like to clone the current 500gb drive as its almost full at the moment. The cloning of the drive would be of great knowledge for my own personal use, however for my specific needs, the cloning of the drive is not an absolute necessity... what I'm afraid of though is if I remove the currently full 500GB drive, install the new 500gb drive, I know the PVR will recognize it, and format it for use... however if I wanted to revert back to the ORIGINAL 500GB drive, would it ask to format that one too since the last drive was a different drive?
It's only a guess, but if it wants to format the drive it's because the drive isn't already in the format it needs (FAT32 or NTFS) or it wants to impose a proprietary format on the drive. Can your PC read the contents of the existing external drive and what does the drive properties show. If your PC cannot read the contents, I don't know how you would clone it on a PC.
no, once the hard drive is connected to the pvr, the pvr formats it into whatever format the pvr use, all I know is that its an encrypted format that is only usable by the pvr. The hard drive will not show up if connected to a pc, unless you go into the hard drive management section, and RE-FORMAT into fat32, or ntfs format, which turns it back into a pc hard drive. I know the pvr drive can be cloned, all the googling I've done shows how to replace the hard drive, not clone it.. I just don't know what software is used to clone the drive keeping all the encryption in place.... any ideas??
