I would like to know if you can change the regular hard disk of 80Gb to another one. Maybe a hard disk of around 400Gb.
Is it also possible to attach the removed hard disk of the DMR-E85H to a regular windows XP PC and look what's on it?
No to both questions. Propriatory firmware prevents this. If you remove the drive and attempt to put it back in again, it will attempt to format it. The only units that will allow upgrades to drives are some of the Chinese made recorders and (I think) some of the Pioneer units. No Pannies though...
Thanks for your answer. If i understand correctly, I can place a new disk if i don't care about losing data on the old one. The recorder will just format the new disk.
The DMR-E85H sold in the USA came with a 120 GB drive, not an 80 GB drive. If you replace the drive with a larger drive, it will only format to 120 GB.
However, I thought that you could install the drive in a Windows machine and examine the files. OldFart13 may know better.
By the way, there is a huge thread about DMR-E85H issues and problems related to Panasonic DVRs. It was started to address U99 errors, but there is a lot of great info to be found there.
Does this mean that you can replace the HDD (with a regualr, but same sized HDD) if it goes bad? Or do you have to throw out the whole unit when the HDD eventually craps the bed?
As zwuido has indicated, yes you can replace the original Samsung drive with another drive. I believe there are many posters on the U99 thread, http://forums.afterdawn.com/thread_jump.cfm/143317/1637364-440984, that have successfully replaced the original drive with other drives (same size or larger), but then the unit only formats the drive to 120 GB (i.e. USA).
I was playing around with one the drives and installed it into a Windows 98 machine. One thing I noticed is that this drive was selected for the DVR's because it is really super-quiet, much quieter than the drive that came with my 6 year old PC. Samsung advertizes it as a super-quiet drive. That is something to consider if you decide to ever replace it. I'd suggest a super-quiet model. Another thing I noticed is that the Samsung drive gets extremely hot in the DVR if the fan is not running.
