Upgrade/Replace hard disk of Philips DVDR 3455H

I recently succeeded to replace my 3455h recorder's hard disk with another one. Here is my recorder: Philips DVDR3455H97 with 160G HDD

My HDD became full and I was wanting to keep it out of the recorder, replacing it with newer or bigger one. I heard that 3455 can support IDE hard disk up to 250G and made my search and tests. Searched internet and Looked for mane DVDR forums and blogs. No helpful information was found. I had been doing this for 2 years and without any success.

But few days ago when I was just thinking to completely stop my fruitless attempts, one idea came to my mind. I realised the idea and it was DONE!!

Ok. It is very very simple procedure and here is how to do it:

1. Download 3455H/97 firmware from Here and burn it on CD.

2. Open the cover and replace hard disk with another one. (no matter formatted or brand new one). I replaced original Western Digital 160G hard with Seagate 160G one.

3. Switch on your recorder. In a few second CD driver will be opened. Put firmware CD into the drive and close. Recorder will ask go for firmware update or not. Just run firmware update.

4. After successful update go to Setup and run Disk format.

It is done!

Note: I did id on firmware version R19.15. If you have older one then first upgrade firmware to R19.15 with original hard disk. After this do above 4 steps. The reason I am suggesting this is I did not test it on older version than R19.15!!!

Now I thinking to try the process with bigger HDD, like 250G one.