Posted by rmhartman on 05/18/07 00:00

My Panny just woke up with the "unformat" problem this morning. I
checked on the web and there did not seem to be any instances of a
cure. I did not want to reformat and lose the data though, so I
though I would replace it with a 60g disk I had lying around (yes, I
know that it will still only use 40g of it due to a firmware
limitation).



After I swapped the new drive in, I started the machine up and ...
nothing. Not even the "unformat" error display. The little circle of
lights spins for a while, then it just kind of shuts down and displays
the time. There is /nothing/ on the video -- no menu even. I was
expecting it to ask me if it wanted me to reformat the disk!

Questions:

1) is the panny software actually on the drive? I was expecting
firmware to ask me to format the new drive, but it doesn't do
anything, no menus, nothing. I have not partitioned the new drive.
perhaps it can't do that itself. If that is the case, what partition
type do I need? Linux? FAT? FAT32? NTFS?

2) I tried to use Acronis to clone the old drive onto the new one, but
it reported the old drive as unpartitioned. It's possible that just
the partition block has been fried. Would any tech-oriented person be
willing to take their DMR-HS2 drive out, hook it up to a linux box,
and "dd" the first 512 bytes from it into a file? This would give me
the partition table and any bootstrap code that is required.

3) are there any other suggestions?

[Back to original message]