Question Access DVR HDD on WINDOWS PC and copy recorded footage?

[chanwei21]

Hello,

I need a help!

Due to my DVR's date error issue jumped back to year 1970 as my DVR UI can only view or copy footage on year 2004 and above only.
I already removed the recorded HDD and install it on my PC but I can't access the HDD directly only format option can be choosen using windows 10 disk manager.
is there any software can be install to view DVR HDDs on PC?


Thanks in advance!!

 

[justin.m.beauvais]

DVRs use a different format than Windows supports. Depending on what they decided to go with for a filesystem you might not be able to access it at all, but using Linux might give you the best results.

My advice is to download a disk image of Ubuntu and burn that image to a DVD or put it on a flash drive. Then boot to the media in live mode. This will load the OS into RAM so you can use it without installing it. Then, see what hard drives it detects. If it does detect the DVRs drive you should be able to copy files from one hard drive to a Windows compatible drive and see what you can do with them. If it doesn't recognize the drive or the files are in a proprietary format, you might just be out of luck completely.

Good luck!

 

[fzabkar]

Use a disk editor (eg DMDE) to examine sector 0 and the next few sectors. This will tell what kind of file system your DVR uses.

 

[AllanGH]

Get a live Linux bootable CD....Knoppix would be fine.....and read the drive from within Knoppix.

Most security DVRs are Linux-based, and would probably use one of the following filesystems:
ext2, ext3, ext4, jfs

It is doubtful that Reiser, Resier4, xfs, btrfs would be used.

 

[fzabkar]

If it's a Linux file system ...

Freeware Linux Reader for Windows - DiskInternals
https://www.diskinternals.com/linux-reader

 

[popatim]

Many DVR's encrypt their recordings to prevent exactly this.