Copying clips off a DVD-SH853M hard drive

[Sabranan]

Howdy people,

I’ve got myself the following situation. A family member has a whole bunch of old home movies on VHS tapes that he needs put onto DVD’s, after quite some amount of editing. I’ve recorded them onto my DVD-SH853M’s hard drive which is fine, but most of the files are too big to fit onto a single DVD.

If I split the files up and copied them individually, I’d be looking at burning and ripping to DVD about 100 times to get the whole lot of my computer (there’s a lot of tapes here). I would prefer not to do that since it’d take ages.

So I got the idea of removing the units hard drive and hooking it straight up to my pc, which would be a hell of a lot quicker. I’ve connected the hard drive and assigned the FAT32 part of it a drive letter, and can see the files I want to copy (in the form of CLIPX.MPG, where X is the file no.). Lovely. Unfortunately I can’t copy the files or even play them because I get this error message "You require permission from the computer's administrator to make changes to this file”. This is after I’ve confirmed that I am the admin on the UAC dialogue.

Having a look around on the web the most common solution seems to be to take ownership & grant full control of the files, but since this isn’t an NTFS drive permissions should be a non-issue. Anyone got any other ideas as to how I can access these files?

 

[bonzobanana]

While I can't offer any direct help, I'm interested to hear how you get on. I've read about people trying to read LG and Humax partitions (2 other korean companies) and I don't think the LG problem was sorted but there is a program for reading humax partitions directly. I'll see if I can find the humax link.

9200T

Might have some useful information on that site as it could be a similar format to samsung.

Keep us informed how you get on.

 

[Sabranan]

While I can't offer any direct help, I'm interested to hear how you get on. I've read about people trying to read LG and Humax partitions (2 other korean companies) and I don't think the LG problem was sorted but there is a program for reading humax partitions directly. I'll see if I can find the humax link.

9200T

Might have some useful information on that site as it could be a similar format to samsung.

Keep us informed how you get on.

Well, disk manager says there are two partitions, a 64MB unallocated area and the rest of the drive as a FAT32. Assigning a drive letter to the FAT32 part yields a directory structure that can be navigated at least.

The actual files seem to be stored under X:\VIDEO\CLIP\AA, there are also folders AB, AC etc up to AJ, not sure what defines that the videos are put in AA but mine all are.

Copy and paste actually works on other areas of the drive, there are a few other files around with the same naming convention as the files I’m after (CLIPX.MAP, CLIPX.IFO and CLIPX.REF) which I can copy, move and delete or do whatever I like to.

Just the actual video clip files themselves, the MPG’s, that seem to be immune to reading/writing. Tried in an elevated command prompt too, using “xcopy clip* f:\ /c” which just returns “Access Denied”.

Where I have had success however is with a rather long process. A freeware utility called Pc Inspector File Recovery can see the drive and the files, and can copy them off it! Annoyingly it’ll only do one at a time, simply crashing if I try any more, but it’s still quicker than burning them all to a DVD! Checking the first one I did shows it does playback, so doesn’t seem to be encrypted or anything. That’s probably about the best solution I’m going to get I think.