Pioneer HDD recorder

[motorollin]

Or use dd to clone one disk to the other regardless of the format. That's how people upgrade the hard disks in Sky+ boxes.

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moto

[motorollin]

Just had a thought about using dd... won't be much good for your purposes. Yes it will clone the whole disk from the old to the new, but it will keep the partition the same size as the original. Speel is right - you would need to know what format the disk is in so you can manually reproduce the partition layout (assuming it's in a non-proprietary format).

Have you considered the possibility that the device will format the disk for you? Some Sky+ boxes do this. You just put the new disk in and the box detects that the disk doesn't contain the right data and formats it for you. There's no risk in trying it.

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moto

[motorollin]

Ok, have a look here:

http://www.ubuntu.com/getubuntu/download

Download the Desktop Edition and burn it to CD. It will boot you in to a nice friendly Linux system. If you connect the hard disk from your Pioneer to your PC then boot from the Ubuntu live CD, then you can use the partition editor it comes with to view the partitions on the disk. If it is in a recognised format, it will tell you what format the partition is. If you can check that and report back we can help you with the next step.

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moto