IDE Hard Drive Information. HELP!!!!!!

[23790954 0]

Hello to all you good forum members. I would like advice on the following problem, as I am well into my 70's and have NO cctv technical knowledge at all.

Over 3 years ago, I purchased an X-Vision E4DVRCD cctv video recorder which housed an 80 gig IDE hard drive.

As the hard drive had been used for over three years, I decided to replace it with a 500 gig hard drive.

Both hard drives were Seagate, and both compatible with the recorder. I purchased a brand new Seagate 500 gig hard drive, and fitted it into the cctv recorder, and discarded the original 80 gig hard drive. As all the correct signs were showing on the system monitor, I thought that everything was working o.k. About 2 months after fitting the new hard drive, my neighbour had his hanging baskets stolen, and the police came and asked if they could view my cctv recordings.

It was then that I realized that my cctv recorder FAILED to rewind and play what I thought would have been recorded.

I have since purchased another Seagate hard drive and installed it, but still I cannot get the cctv recorder to rewind and play any recordings it may have made.

As I build and repair computers as a hobby, the hard drives I have tried installing were Seagate computer hard drives, which were completely formatted, with NO data on at all, when I installed them. Should these hard drives have worked correctly, or are the hard drives for cctv recorders different from computer hard drives, or should cctv hard drives have some pre-recorded data on them to make them function correctly.

All help and information on this matter, would be greatly appreciated.

Many thanks to all who offer their help.

[Birdman Adam 0]

Nothing special about the HDDs in CCTV recorders (other than that some people use enterprise drives that last longer).

 

I haven't swapped HDDs myself, but I think after a new drive is installed, the DVR must be instructed to format the drive. Often they have their own little format (which is why you typically can't take the drive and view it on a computer).

 

Also, I suppose it is possible that the 500GB drive was too big for the DVR to use. As you probably kow some older tech is like that. Do you have the manual for the DVR? It should include a procedure for swapping HDDs.

 

Oh, and why in the world do people steal hanging baskets...?

[Soundy 1]

Adam has nailed it, I think: most standalone DVRs use their own drive formats (since a lot of them are Linux-based, it may be ext2/ext3), so simply popping in a FAT32 or NTFS formatted disk won't work. Most will prompt you to format or in some other way "prepare" the disk, but yours may not have.

 

Hmmm, interestingly, I found the manual for this unit (http://www.x-vision.co.uk/PDFI/E4DVRCD%20Inst1.2.pdf) and it suggests that the DVR DOES use a standard Windows-compatible format and that the drive can be plugged directly into a PC and files accessed that way. However, it will probably still be necessary to use their "format" function to properly prepare the drive.

[23790954 0]

Many many thanks to both for your replies. I had to make this query before I decided to part with the DVR which obviously must have a rewind/replay fault, as both hard drives I have tried to install of compatible make, 1 x 400 gig and 1 x 500 gig were both formatted after being installed as instructed to do on monitor when installing hard drive. Neither will rewind previous recordings in order for them to be replayed.

Once again many thanks for your help.

[Soundy 1]

DVRs don't really "rewind" - video records continuously, you just skip back to previously recorded footage. I would guess that there may have been a change in the record function, intentionally, accidentally, or through some fault - maybe switched to an alert-only mode, or using motion-detect recording but with the motion zones cleared, or something else that's in some way preventing it from recording.