SATA drive formatter without data loss- Disk in unknown/proprietary format

[opdez69]

Hello, and thanks in advance for the help.

Basically, I have a broken Dish Network ViP 722 DVR (no HD damage whatsoever) and would like to be able to take the SATA drive inside (a Seagate 500 GB ST3500830SCE) and get the data from it onto my PC. Unfortunately, the HDD (not the data within) is in some completely alien format that i can't identify, and neither can windows disk management or the program UFS explorer. I can simply initialize the disk, but that wouldn't be the right action, as i need the data on the disk.

I'm not even asking how to decrypt the files actually on the disk, as all I would like to do is have a formatter to get the HDD in an accessible format, as disk management and hardware manager both acknowledge its presence but don't know what the format is.

Drivers installed automatically and seem to work fine by the way.

[quickoldcar]

From what i get is usually this is done while streaming and then capturing it some way into a different file type.

The only way i know is being inside the unit and using a digital video conversion box, i'm unsure what type format they use.

Got the filetype?

Could something like Total Video Converter -- AVI to MPEG Converter, Convert Video Youtube FLV to MPEG Converter,AVI to DVD Converter,AVI to DivX Converter do it since you already have the files locally.

[opdez69]

well part of the problem is that windows explorer won't display it, and disk management just says it needs to be formatted, with pretty much no additional info. I assume the file types of the video are encrypted MP2 or something, but i'll cross that bridge when i get to it.