So there you are with your Pioneer DVR633H-S, DVR545H, DVR-550H, DVR-520H, Sony HXD showing you an HDD Error and refusing to boot... This usually indicates that the harddrive in the recorder went bad. But don't panic, there may be hope!

Unlike other utilities for this task, this program is capable of reconstructing the movies from the harddrive by parsing the filesystem structure of the Pioneer DVR instead of just dumping MPEG-chunks!

For further information on how to use it and for technical details about the filesystem structure, please refer to the README file. For the impatient ones, assuming you have a disk image image.dd and a recovery destination directory f:\dump, just do:

pioneer_rec -d c:\image.dd f:\dump

Binary: pioneer_rec.zip

Discussion: Blog post

Here is a compatibility matrix of the recorders that were reported to work with the respective version of the utility:

Header	Pioneer	Sony
dvr520h.h	DVR-520H
dvr545h.h	DVR-545H, DVR-640H-S
dvr550h.h	DVR-550H	HXD870, HXDx90, HXD995, HXD1070
dvr633h.h	DVR-433H, DVR-530H, DVR-633H, DMR-XW300

For Panasonic DVR recorders, you can have a look at my panasonic-rec project.