PVR - Sagem PVR6240 - upgrade hard disk

R

Roger Taylor

Guest
I've had a Sagem PVR6240 freeview box for about a year now and it has generally worked well. Unfortunately it only has a 40Gb hard drive (20 hours recording time) and I was wondering if anyone had any experience of just changing the drive to an 80 or 160Gb. I've tried putting the hard dirve into my PC (W2k) but it recognises that an extra drive is present but doesn't display any information about it not any of the data on it.

Alternatively is there any way of download files from the Sagem to my PC so that I can just write them to DVD?
 
I've had a Sagem PVR6240 freeview box for about a year now and it has generally worked well. Unfortunately it only has a 40Gb hard drive (20 hours recording time) and I was wondering if anyone had any experience of just changing the drive to an 80 or 160Gb. I've tried putting the hard dirve into my PC (W2k) but it recognises that an extra drive is present but doesn't display any information about it not any of the data on it.

Alternatively is there any way of download files from the Sagem to my PC so that I can just write them to DVD?

You can change the HDD, but there are a couple of problems which you need to be aware of. Firstly, you can only initialise a new blank HDD when an OAD is being broadcast. There is no other way of doing it AFAIK - there is a provisional OAD this weekend, version 0.4.5MH. Secondly, the new HDD's power requirements must be similar to the original drive, particularly start-up current.

Good results reported with Samsung 2514N HDDs - 250GB...:D

In answer to your latter query, it is possible to extract video files from the HDD if you physically remove it from the PVR and connect it up to your PC.

The format of the drive is non-standard, and that is why your PC cannot see it as a formatted drive. In order to read and convert the files on the HDD, you need an excellent piece of software called DVBTX which can be downloaded from here. This utility was developed by a clever guy over on the French Sagem forum.

There's lots of other info here on the UK Sagem PVR forum.

Note that any of these procedures will void your warranty and are at your own risk...;)
 
Paul,

That's brilliant, thanks very much for such a complete reply, I thought I wasn't going to get any replies. I've got a 200Gb Maxtor coming from a friend and I'll let you know how I get on. The Sagem forum is very enlightening !
 
Paul,

That's brilliant, thanks very much for such a complete reply, I thought I wasn't going to get any replies. I've got a 200Gb Maxtor coming from a friend and I'll let you know how I get on. The Sagem forum is very enlightening !

Glad the info proved helpful. :smashin:

We're a friendly bunch over there, and there is a wealth of information on the forum about everything Sagem - I'm sure you will be made very welcome! :thumbsup:
 
Just a thought.

Would it be possible to use somekind of windowstool to clone discs.

hook both original sagem disc and "new" large disc into your computer, run prg to clone disc.

Seems possible to me, but maby then your 200 Gb disc will become 40 Gb.

//Mattias
 
Would it be possible to use somekind of windowstool to clone discs.

hook both original sagem disc and "new" large disc into your computer, run prg to clone disc.

Seems possible to me, but maby then your 200 Gb disc will become 40 Gb.

A number of people were working on this idea before the OAD procedure was discovered.

The disk format is a very unusual one, and despite trying most tools available no one managed to faithfully replicate the disk structure on a new drive without errors. Of the few successful clonings, the disk appeared exactly as the original drive, i.e. 40GB, regardless of the size of the new drive.

The OAD procedure, however, works perfectly with any size of drive and gives the correct available recording time.

One of the other issues with the Sagem is the limitation of a maximum of 100 titles on the HDD - and it starts nagging you to remove some at 83. This does put a bit of a damper on installing a really large HDD.
 
Just as I thought then.

If you clone a HDD you make a perfekt clone MBR an everything.

I live in Sweden and I don´t really know what an OAD means.

Is it a manufacturer upgrade ??

//Mattias
 
Just as I thought then.

If you clone a HDD you make a perfekt clone MBR an everything.

I live in Sweden and I don´t really know what an OAD means.

Is it a manufacturer upgrade ??

Yep, that's it - OAD stands for 'Over the Air Download', i.e a firmware update.

A couple of Sagem forum members managed to clone the HDD - and it worked in the box - but for some reason they had errors during the cloning process which were never fully explained.
 
Paul,

Thanks for all your help. Amazingly, I have now managed to change the 40Gb drive in my Sagem PVR6240 to a 200Gb Maxtor drive. The OAD has formatted it, and I have a quoted 85 hours recording time. Brilliant. It started with an error 01, and then when I switched it on, it sat showing 01-- for some time and then suddenly burst into life.

I have even managed to contact Dominique Ezvan who has written the utility DVBT, but this will only extract the titles of recordings to a PC. It will not read or write the files from PC to PVR, nor is he going to develop it to do so.

Anyway, I have recorded one 90 min film, and I still have 99% free space on the Sagem!!
 
Paul,

And just one other thing I've found. The engineers menu (where you can manually format the disk) is to be found by pressing
Menu
 
Paul,

And one other thing. You can format the hard disk manually by using the engineers menu which is located by pressing

Menu
Technical Information
Product Data
A
B and I(nformation) together.
 
Nice to hear your HDD upgrade went well!:smashin:

I have even managed to contact Dominique Ezvan who has written the utility DVBT, but this will only extract the titles of recordings to a PC. It will not read or write the files from PC to PVR, nor is he going to develop it to do so.
That's right, the utility was only ever designed to extract the files from the PVR to the PC, so they could be burnt to DVD.

Take care with the format option in the engineer's menu - it will format the HDD, but will leave you with a blank HDD, i.e. you will then need a firmware install via an OAD to complete the process.:(
 
sparky_Paul

thanks for the info

is this the drive that you refer to:

http://www.samsung.com/au/products/harddiskdrive/harddiskdrive/sp2514n.asp

also

it looks as if there is a firmware upgrade scheduled for the weekend after next

is it as simple as popping the new drive in.... waiting for the firmware upgrade.... hope that it formats the drive... and off you go?

sounds nice and simple

and with the disk coming in at £60 odd.... certainly gives me plenting of recording bang for the buck

thanks again

yukioMishima
 
is this the drive that you refer to:

http://www.samsung.com/au/products/harddiskdrive/harddiskdrive/sp2514n.asp

also

it looks as if there is a firmware upgrade scheduled for the weekend after next

is it as simple as popping the new drive in.... waiting for the firmware upgrade.... hope that it formats the drive... and off you go?

sounds nice and simple

That looks like it.

It's not difficult, the box will throw up a few errors, then download the firmware from the OAD and format the disc. Make sure the firmware being broadcast is the correct one for your model, either the 6200/6600 or 7200 series machines.

I suggest having a read of this thread over on the Sagem forum, so you have an idea what is happening. Join the forum if you like, were a friendly bunch!:thumbsup:
 
sparky_paul

purchased the drive..... need to get a T10 screwdriver and i should be good to go

according to: http://www.dtg.org.uk/retailer/download_schedule.pl ..... it looks as if the OAD should be broadcast next weekend... so seems like a good time to give it a shot (i have the 6240t)

i did read on the forums that a couple of people were having troubles..... and questioned whether or not it was because the OAD was broadcast on mux b... or was that a false alarm and in fact it was just that the OAD was just not broadcast the weekend people were having ussues

thanks again for all

yukioMishima
 
i did read on the forums that a couple of people were having troubles..... and questioned whether or not it was because the OAD was broadcast on mux b... or was that a false alarm and in fact it was just that the OAD was just not broadcast the weekend people were having ussues

I seem to remember there was one weekend when there was a problem with the OAD.

However, the boxes do not seem to pick up the OADs everytime. The procedure is to switch on the box, then switch to standby for 30 seconds, then turn it back on again - usually this then picks up the OAD, but occasionally you have to repeat the procedure several times before the box will pick it up.

I personally haven't had any problems when the OADs have been on different muxes.:)
 
sparky_paul (+ others)

Thanks for all your help.

WOW.... WOW... WOW

I popped the lid off the box (not super easy.... but not too tricky).. dropped the aforementioned samsung 250gb drive in..... fired it up... got the er01 message as descibed.... after about 10 min of flashing... the sagem finally sprung into init mode... and low and behold i had access to the box again

i checked the info on the HDD... and there... in all its glory.... the samsung was listed... with 105 hours of recording time... :clap:

and as stated here and elsewhere... it also appears that the boot up process... accessing the EPG etc alll seems a little nippier with the new drive.... i guess the 8mb cache must help with this?

all in all... the upgrade was pretty painless... from start to finish approx 20 min (of which 10 of them were taken up by the OAD reformatting the disk)

for anyone that is even slightly techie i would heartily recommend giving the upgrade a shot

one nice little bonus (at least for me as i had quite a few setup)..... all of my pregrammed recording timers were still available after the upgrade.... so i am assuming that that info must be stored somewhere other than the HDD.... so that saved me some time + effort in having to reset those (which i was anticipating having to do)... :smashin:

the next trick is to find out how i can get the recordings off my old drive and move them to the new one (mac OS X)

thanks again one and all for the info on attempting the upgrade... it has given my sagem a short reprieve from being swapped out for a toppy

thanks again :thumbsup:

yukioMishima
 

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