The kids have managed to clog up the HDD with around 100 programs on my X+ box. Is there an easier way to copy the programs to my PC other then use the playback function via SCART and do an analogue capture.

Basically can I pull out the hard drive, plug it into my PC and read it with anything ?

not sure how it is formatted. windows will not recognise it and ask you to format. There is a program for PC that allow reading and dumping of humax pvrs but nobody has bothered with virgin as of yet. I would bet my left nut that it is ext formatted so you will have more luck in a linux machine. Films will be drm'ed to not be copied twice so will have a headache with those ones.

as you might already know you can throw in a bigger drive while you are in there, v+ will format it and show 80gb but you can record for the full capacity.

Originally Posted by hawkish

not sure how it is formatted. windows will not recognise it and ask you to format. There is a program for PC that allow reading and dumping of humax pvrs but nobody has bothered with virgin as of yet. I would bet my left nut that it is ext formatted so you will have more luck in a linux machine. Films will be drm'ed to not be copied twice so will have a headache with those ones.

as you might already know you can throw in a bigger drive while you are in there, v+ will format it and show 80gb but you can record for the full capacity.

I am also pretty sure that it uses ext or some variant. I have already upgraded to 500GB, been bad since the kids worked out to record stuff, lol. I have some HD stuff as well that I would like to copy but I am guessing that will be encrypted. The kids stuff is mostly bbc channels but some Nick Jr stuff as well.

I used acronis to clone the orginal disk. There seem to be 3 partition, one around 20GB which I guess is the O/S, a 2GB one which I am guessing is temp, then the main recording area. I don't think they showed up as ext in acronis. I have the orginal drive with some recordings to play with so I might have a look later on.

I would guess that the 2gb partition is the swap, 20gb is for VR things like pause live tv and the rest for programmes. there cant be any OS on there as its all on the flash memory of the box so dont worry about that

That would make sense, there is an option to format the drive I believe so O/S would not be on there.

Anyway, plugged in the orginal disk, there are 4 partition. 2 x 500MB, 1 x 27GB and the the rest. All are showing as Ext3. I will have a play later and see what happens.