cloning hard drive

I have a Panasonic blue-ray recorder with freesat that has a 250Gb 5200rpm hard drive. The p/n is DMR-BS750EB and it works fine. I have a redundant Samsung 850 EVO of 500Gb used before I started using the pc's M2 slot. I use the dish that I got when I used a SKY box, and there are some channels which are missing from my current Virgin box.
Panasonic use a proprietry o/s and I would like to clone the drives and take advantage of the size increase. Before I take the Panasonic to bits to get the drive out, I would like advice on whether this is possible and what free software would be best to use if it is.

tinmar49 said:

The p/n is DMR-BS750EB

Click to expand...

We have two Blueray recorders Panasonic DMR-BCT760EG. Similar but for cable networks. They have default 500 GB, but for what we use it for (many movies saved for a longer time), even that was not enough.

I did consider to try to change the internal drive(s) and I too found out it's a dedicated filesystem. Possibly there are solutions for it, but decided not to risk the destruction of the whole recorder.

My solution was to buy external USB-SDD drives of 1 TB (we have two recorders) and move files from the internal drive onto the external drive, so that I keep enough space for recording. Bought it in Jan. 2023 @ amazon.nl, it's still there, this is the link to it, this is the same object but @ amazon.co.uk and prized in pounds.

Of course any other quality external SDD would do too, but I have been using this configuration on two recorders now for more than 3 years with nearly daily use and no problems at all, except you need to have some patience when transferring files (transfer is not possible when recording is done).

I understand you'd rather use the spare HDD you'r having and hopefully someone else has a solution for that, but this would be an alternative.

BTW. It is not possible to move the external SDD drive from one recorder to another recorder. The external drive will be formatted and numbered in such a way that it only will function on the recorder it was formatted on. If your recorder at any time might fail, you will not be able to transfer the recorded files to another recorder. You can use the same drive on another recorder (if that recorder has the same functionality for an external drive), but it will have to be formatted again first. This all seems to be necessary because of copyrights. I don't like it, but it's what it is. Silly, because if I transfer a recorded file onto a DVD or Blueray disk, that will be done without problems, but then I would need many blueray disks...

Edit: Now I read the User manual of your recorder DMR-BS750EB I came to the conclusion, that this model is much older (from about 2010) than ours (2018/2021). As far as I found, nowhere in the manual is written how to attach an external USB to the recorder. The max. size of an USB memory stick seems to be specified for 128 GB and no copy will be possible from recorded files on your HDD.

So I am very sorry having written the upper description, but it seems not to be possible on your model to connect an external USB-HDD or USB-SSD at all.

I have been searching somewhat and found the threads linked below. There certainly are more threads to be found about the subject, it's just meant as a start.

Description of a method to copy files from a Panasonic Blueray recorder to a PC (via the network connection of the BR Rec).
The method was written in 2011 and is using an app called 'Twonky', of which I have no idea if it still exists.

Description of a bit-copy from one HDD of an Panasonic Blueray recorder to another HDD.
The description (2024) was made for a copy on a Mac OSX PC, but it seems to me that a similar bit-copy should be possible on a Windows PC as well, using well-known cloning software like Clonezilla (freeware), Macrium, Hasleo or whatever there is. Problem will be how to do a bit copy onto a larger HDD...