Trying to slave HDD from DVR into Windows 7, Disk Management says not initialised

The HDD is from our home security camera system. Explorer can't see it, Disk Management sees it but says it's unitialised and wants me to choose a partition style. I've attached a picture to show exactly what Disk Management says.

I haven't done anything with jumpers because I wasn't sure if they were needed and figured I'd just toss the drive in and see what happened. I'm assuming, given I've got this far, that I don't need to do anything with jumpers? Anyway, I'm not willing to do anything with Disk Management until I have a clear idea of what's going on. I'd hate to mess up the DVR drive and potentially the entire security system's program.

I'm trying to copy the entire contents of the drive to an external drive. You're supposed to be able to browse the recordings using the DVR system and also back up the recordings by inserting a FAT32 drive in the USB port. I can't see any pattern to how the recording lists are sorted and the lists seem to change anyway as you go back and forth between pages so trying to browse them is a joke. I've tried backing up using various disks and never got more than one file, despite leaving the drive sitting there for hours.

I don't have a suitable HDD external case to use and was hoping to avoid buying one.

The DVR is a WGSDVR3200 with a Western Digital HDD model WD2500AVVS. The website for the DVR is http://www.watchguardalarms.com.au .

So, hope someone knows enough about this to help me achieve my goal. Quite honestly, I wonder if the system has never worked properly and that's why I've never been able to wrap my head around it. New toy, new concepts and maybe it's faulty?? Great combination, if so!

 

I've just noticed a distinct lack of the picture I attached. I'll try again.

 

I looked through the manuals for the DVRs offered through the link you cited. They indicate the DVRs use a customized version of the Linux operating system. Windows has no support for reading or writing to Linux drive partitions.

You could try Puppy Linux. It is a version of the Linux OS which you can boot from a CD or USB drive without installing onto a hard disk like Windows. This may allow you to access the files on the disc and save them to the external drive. When you're done, just reboot normally. http://puppylinux.org/main/Overview and Getting Started.htm

 

Thank you SO much for taking the time to look through the manuals. I suspect I'm still novice enough in this field that they didn't make much sense to me at all and I have no memory of them saying anything about operating systems.

I'm not sure if we have a computer that runs Linux AND can take the drive but I'll ask the sleeping member of the household when he wakes up what he has set up and try again.

 

One trick you might use - many Linux 'flavors' offer a downloadable ISO file that can be burned onto a boot-up-trial-start CD.

This lets me boot up my PC to that Linux CD, and it leaves my Windows C: Drive alone.

I suppose I could attach a DVR's linux-hard-drive to that computer, boot up to that "live trial startup" CD and then learn about the file-manager to see if I can 'mount' that DVR-hard drive. (And identify it by Device ID.)