Hi,
this has been the bugbear of many on here with this problem and its an absolute pain, the information regarding the use of HDD drives is sparse at best, but here is what i have learnt.
get a separate drive for HDD recording from your tv, the reason is that your tv, in order for the drive to work has to be formatted in FAT32 and once connected to the tv you have to "register" the drive to it to be able to use the record function.
you can use a HDD drive with all your stored media on it (music, movies, photos) and can pass that freely from your pc to your tv and back again with no problems at all, just DONT register it to the tv.
having said all that you can re use the samsung drive on your pc again but you need to go into disc management to sort it out, however some have had problems once they delete the offending partition (probably because they did something wrong).
getting Sony to open up with any form of help in this matter, unfortunately is like trying to get blood out of a stone, so for most of us we have to sort it out amonst ourselves.
regards
