Switching Hard drives without having the drive reformatted
Now heres the trick, if you put back in your original drive the DVD Recorder will try to format it over after power up. Of course if you have nothing on it of value go ahead and you can ignore the rest of this. To save your data follow these steps.
1) PLUG OUT the DVD Recorder and put in the orginal drive at a 45 deg angle and install all the wires. Make Sure That The drive in a posistion That You Can Pull Off The Power Lead easily, Use cloth or Plastic To Insulate the drives metal case so that it cant short out on anything.
2) Plug in the unit and let it power up, after a few seconds it will come up with the screen saying format the drive "Yes or No". You cannot change from "Yes", your only option is to hit ENTER which will erase all the data. Before you do this pull off the POWER lead from the HD, but do not touch the IDE cable only the POWER, also make sure to pull it off evenly.
3) Now go ahead and hit "ENTER". The unit will start to format and get stuck since it cannot talk to the HD.
4) After about 5 sec unplug the receiver from the AC Plug and reconnect the HD Power cable, Install The drive properly. Then plug back in the receiver and it should do a quick scan of the drive restoring all your recorded shows back into it's list. effectively bypassing the format routine.