[snarf]

trying to upgrade the HD on an LG RHT497H. Having problems.

Bought a 1TB Seagate SATA drive which has lower power consumption ratios than the 160GB UltraATA/100 Seagate that the DVD recorder comes with.

Using a SATA to IDE converter kit and the problem is.......

1st boot-up - black screen. Powers down.
From then on it cycles up for 1 min with alternate green and blue screens before powering down and immediately back up.

So what is it trying to do and should I be formatting the drive in Linux with a 500GB partition or something???

[bonzobanana]

Unfortunately I don't know much about LG dvd recorders but I have some experience with Samsung. With the Samsung you have to do a hot swap.

1. turn on dvd recorder with original hard drive.

2. wait for hard drive to spin down in 5 minutes or so, 10 to be safe.

3. Disconnect power plug from fitted hard drive.

4. Disconnect IDE cable.

5. Connect IDE cable to replacement hard drive.

6. Connect power plug to replacement hard drive.

7. Go straight to disc manager and choose format.

8. Then put recorder into standby, turn on and format HDD again.

There is obviously some risk with this procedure because you are hot swapping.

With the samsung if you just replace the drive. The disc manager is in-accessible and the recorder is likely to keep resetting at different times which is exactly the same as having no hard drive at all. It seems to need to see the boot signature of a hard drive already formatted before any hdd functionality is available.

Maybe the LG operates the same or maybe as there is no model in the range with a 500GB hard drive it doesn't support that size.

[snarf]

Ooh! Looking.... better!

I hot swapped after 15 mins - the old HDD never seemed to power down - and it didn't crash. Was able to go Initialization > HDD Format and it's now sitting there saying 'Formating HDD, Please wait...' with 'Who Wants to Be a Millionaire?' in the background (me!)

Been 7 mins so hopefully it's taking a while cos it's full-formatting 1 TB.......

[snarf]

"An err in HDD playback or recording is detected."

it says. and then when I turn off and on it's back to the green screen. Doh!

[bonzobanana]

Oh sorry I didn't realise it was 1tb, I had it in my mind it was 500GB for some reason. I don't think you'll get a 1tb drive to work with a dvd recorder with a ide interface. I would imagine 500GB is your top limit at the very most but I think LG only did models upto 320GB so that might be your limit. I think the largest ever ide hard drive was 750GB. So its unlikely LG made any provision for formatting a 1TB IDE hard drive.

[snarf]

Yeah, 1TB was a little ambitious!

Have partitioned to 500GB active with 500GB unallocated (using Windows 7 to shrink partition after formatting with the LG) but that didn't work so am taking it to 160GB just to see if it will recognise that. If not I am debating whether I should risk getting a 500GB IDE drive on the chance it might work.

[bonzobanana]

It doesn't matter what you partition I think the dvd recorder will use its own format and try to use all the hard drive but it won't be able to do it because parameters are beyond its specification. Perhaps you ought to play safe and go for 320GB. Still a generous amount of space for a dvd recorder.

[snarf]

Didn't work. The partition stays, even after the LG formats the drive but it doesn't cope with it. Am going to get an IDE.... should I risk a 500GB? I suppose 320GB will be okay.

[bonzobanana]

DVD recorders only ever do a quick format right at the beginning of the hard drive. Because dvd recorders only use a small fraction of the maximum writing speed of a hard drive they usually verify what they write and map out bad sectors automatically so don't need to do a full slow format anyway. For example to write 4.7gb of data over 1hr (the highest bitrate a dvd recorder writes at apart from fast dubbing to dvd) its something like 1.2 megabytes per second. Share that by 8 for the EP 8hr mode. Where as the real read/write speed of such hard drives is probably over 50 megabytes per second. Basically there is huge over capacity in hard drive bandwidth.

The LG would read the capacity from the hard drive and its required formatting parameters and then probably come up with an error if those parameters were beyond its own allowed parameters.

[snarf]

Thank you Bonzo. That answers my question. 320GB it is!

[bonzobanana]

Best of luck. I'll be interested to hear how you get on. Please note I added an extra step about once its booted normally with the replacement hard drive do a fresh format straight away.