Hello,

We have in a HDD from a CCTV DVR unit. The DVR was trashed and found in a ditch about a mile away from the business after a break in and the police were unable to read the HDD as the heads had failed. It has been possible to get a good disk image of the failed 1TB HDD with about 2000 unreadable sectors. However, the software provided by the CCTV manufacturer is some of the worst I have seen and there does not seem to be support for direct reading of the HDD/filesystem.

The CCTV DVR box is non-functioning. The thieves have ripped off the main BGA processor chip (which is missing). Consequently remounting the HDD in the CCTV box is not an option.

Does anyone have any experience of this manufacturer / filesystem and can make suggestions? Details of unit below:

Sentient EL821
PAL, EN, UK
Manufacturer website: http://www.kguardsecurity.com/global/

Unknown filesystem - Start sector 63, Size 1940952042 sectors
Ext3 - Start 1940925105, Size 12594960 sectors (log files for video recordings)

Thanks for any suggestions.

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CDR - Manchester Data Recovery Services
0161 408 4857
http://www.cheadledatarecovery.co.uk/

"DVR Examiner" is able to browse the filesystem, and provides the following details:

Name: KSF_RSF
Video format: H.264

The "DVR Examiner" software also provided playback and works well. It seems like well designed software. However, the subscription fee ($8500 for 3 years) is somewhat prohibitive for infrequent use.

have you tried to run RAW through the drive, or do you need access this files through the filesystem?

Just a lot of .GZ file headers detected. This is typical for multi-camera/stream video. RAW recovery is no good for these, it is a case of reading the filesystem correctly.

Sir ,
Long Time Back i Tried Rstudio .It Created Lots of File All Of Different Types And Then i Installed a Player [ Forgot The Name Now ] And i Tried Playing All Those File ,Surprisingly They Were All Video Files

_________________
Regards
Amarbir S Dhillon , Chandigarh Data Recovery Labs [India]
Logical,Semi Physical And Physical Data Recovery
Website-> http://www.chandigarhdatarecovery.com

Hi! In case you are not aware the dvr is still being sold at Maplin for £199
http://www.maplin.co.uk/p/sentient-el82 ... eras-a18nl

Have you tried running the data through the manufacturers viewing software?
If that's not possible you have a few options:
1) You can buy in the dvr from Maplin and try mounting the drive.
2) If number 1 doesn't work you can capture video to the dvr then you can also back up the same to usb and compare the data in your hex editor. On the hard drive you will probably be looking for byte swaps or similar. I have seen internet posts where others have been successful with this method.
3) Contact support but the likely outcome is probably lost and wasted time.

I noticed on the Portuguese site there are tools to download. http://www.kguard.pt/download-ficheiros.html The viewer and also a tool to convert to Avi. Might be of some help.

Why not just buy it for 1 year? It's $3k.

We do a lot of Law Enforcement DR so the fees can be justified. However, we often have to reverse engineer formats to get the footage.

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Data Recovery Ireland

Thanks for the tips. The software has already been downloaded from the manufacturer website. It is some of the worst CCTV/DVR software I have seen. There is no option to view data directly from the HDD without mounting it in the CCTV/DVR. On other CCTV/DVR HDDs we have had in for recovery the manufacturer software has usually allowed playback direct from the HDD

Regarding the fees for the previously mentioned software - they hard to justify as we have a low volume of CCTV related work. In general I try to steer work away from law enforcement (and tribunal/civil) data recovery as there tends to be considerably more administration and report writing associated with these jobs. We just get a few in each year usually from forensic DR companies who cannot deal with a HDD which has failed.

The customer is happy to receive a full disk image of the failed HDD so they can provide it as evidence, and it has been possible to identify the dates/times and camera location of the recorded footage so they are happy.

Thanks!

_________________
CDR - Manchester Data Recovery Services
0161 408 4857
http://www.cheadledatarecovery.co.uk/

That's indeed an unknown filesystem and moreover, it's not an FS and it can't be handled the "traditional" way.

Noticed this topic late, but we do CCTV recoveries for quite a long time already and develop our own recovery software for them.
Should you need an assistance with a similar job in the future, I'll be happy to help recovering videos remotely.

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• Remote RAID, NAS, SAN, VMware, DVR (CCTV), flash and tape recovery. Data recovery support.