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...
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...