1. I wouldn't recommend using a 250gb drive, as it will most likely end up getting formatted incorrectly. The best you're going to get in terms of size is 160GB. Even the HDMI units do not format internal drives larger than this.

2. No.

3. The unit will format your drive for you. The original drive has nothing to do with the formatting process.

4. Unknown, but if I had to venture a guess I'd say it probably wouldn't work. I think the second drive would be meant for as external drive.

5. I don't have any photos. Basically it has an ide connector on board, and the molex connector coming from the psu. The 6200 looks the same except you only have the outline of where the ide connector would be.

It is still unknown at this point if you can get a 6208 working & stable with a larger drive.

Perfect, thanks for those answers. I'll give the full synopsis when I do my upgrade. I'm only throwing in the 250 because it's truly a spare drive lying around.

Thought I would share my experience as this forum proved invaluable in the process.

1. Opening the Motorola box: Remove RF connector box on back panel(rectangle with coaxial connectors on it) simply remove the 2 screws holding it on, then pull it straight off the covered coaxial connectors.
The back of the cable box then has just three 'security screws' to remove in order to get the cover off. These are difficult to undo given that the 'security' feature means a bit head is not easy to come by. I used bull nosed wire cutter pliers to simply grip the head of the security screw- it did not take long to get them out with this method. They are fortunately quite short. The cover then slides backwards and off.

2. Disconect the PSU board: Looking from back to front, the power supply board is the rectangular board on the right that the plug goes into. pull IDE connector that comes from this board out of hard drive (4 wire lead), and PSU connector out of motherboard (multiwire lead).

3. Detach PSU board: this is held on by just 2 screws with phillips heads. Undo screw at top left and bottom right. There are then three (I think) metal tabs that slot through the circuit board that need to be straightened to allow board to come free. These are easily identified as the circuit board has a circle drawn around each of them. Just use needle nose pliers to straighten them. You may also need to bend up metal tabs around the power plug input at the back to free the board up. The power supply board then just lifts out.

4. Install new power supply board- just reverse all the steps above.

5. Reconnect cable box to your coaxial cable.

6. Reload firmware from cable provider- If you do not follow this step, you may just get an 8888 error on plugging in the box, then nothing on the LED. Do not give up! You need to hold down menu and power buttons then plug the box in, this will initiate a firmware download. You should see "dL" in the LED display with a line moving in a square beside it. This download takes about 20 minutes.

7. If your box was previously registered and working with your cable provider you should be good to go. If not, you will need to call the cable company to activate the box (you will need the serial number for them).

Hope this helps a few of you save 6208s from the scrap heap!

Thanks Fraggle!

Hey, do you have some photos of the internal of this unit? I want to check out the board in a few places, but my gamebits won't be in until next week to open it.

Hi XBrav,
Sorry, but I did not take any pictures of the guts. But I do know that somewhere on this forum there are pictures of an opened moto box. It is in a thread about replacing blown capacitors.

By the way, an edit to my post above- step 6, reloading firmware. After you plug back in while holding the menu and power buttons, you need to use the up and down arrows on the box to scroll through the options until "dL" appears. Then press select to initiate software download.

Fraggle,

Yeah I saw those pics. Sadly, it was just of the SATA models. I wanted one of the IDE models. Thanks though!

Hello everyone,

Alright, here's the graphical breakdown of upgrading the hard drive in the 6208. After waiting a week or so to get the gamebit screwdriver in, I was able to open the box. Here's what the internal looks like: (The ribbon cable is missing and the IDE power cable is unplugged because I was working on it beforehand)

http://i11.photobucket.com/albums/a173/DJXBrav/6330c249.jpg

Wasn't very hard to swap out the hard drive. Interestingly enough, the hard drive is set to Cable Select.

Here's where it got fun:

Firstly, I tried going against everybody's recommendations, and installed the 250gb Seagate Barracuda drive by itself. The box happily formatted it without question, and was fully recognized in the Diagnostics:

http://i11.photobucket.com/albums/a173/DJXBrav/e507fd3e.jpg
http://i11.photobucket.com/albums/a173/DJXBrav/bb820286.jpg

So I thought to myself, why not try both hard drives?

Using an external power supply (and later, splitting the internal), I plugged in both hard drives, both setup as Cable Select. Sorry as I don't have pictures of this part.

The diagnostic page did detect both drives. Drive 2 was listed as an external drive, and was properly detected as an 80 gig drive. However, all of the information for drive 2 (the original drive) was N/A. After doing more checking, looks as though the MBR went out the window. Not really a concern, as the new drive is already over 3 times larger.

I tried recording with the 250GB drive and so far have had some interesting results (this all within the last hour). I set the box to start recording Global HD. So far, the percentage growth is indicating that I can get about 50 hours of SD programming. Doesn't seem right, but it is recording properly to the new drive.

Actually it has not been properly recognized / formatted. The system formatted your drive as somewhere around 30GB. This is the same size as you'd get in an hdmi unit with a drive over 160gb not pre-formatted.

I cannot seem to find the article on how to preformat it with one of these units. Help?

The only way to get larger than 160GB is to format the drive externally. You can only do that from a unit that has hdmi output, however they all use sata drives. Now in theory if you could use some type of ide to sata converter, but using that in conjunction with a drive enclosure might be difficult.

Fraggle, great posts. PM'd you, but this may help others...

Where do you get a replacement Power Supply Board for your 6208?

Had a power outage from a wind storm and when power came back, the 6208 wouldn't power up at all.

Tested the power coming off the 20-pin and 4-pin connectors and getting 0V, so I can only guess it's the P/S board that's the problem.

I had hoped that I'd be able to plug in an ATX power supply to the motherboard, but the wire colours are different from that of a PC ATX power supply connector.

Anyone have the connector pin-outs, know where I can get a replacement board, or have any other ideas?

Answering my own question...

Found a local eBay seller with 6412 P/S boards. Same 20-pin power connector but with a SATA HDD power connector. Anyway, just needed an adapter to convert from SATA to IDE power and now the PVR works again! Plus I got it open so I may do the 160GB upgrade too.

Glad to hear my post has helped.

To update, the 6208 with the replaced power supply continues to function completely normally five months after the new PSU was put in.

When I go to an HD channel I am unable to get off that channel without powering down the box and re-powering. This only happens when on an HD channel.
Can't channel up, down, enter a channel on remote, hit last etc,,,

Thoughts?
C

Hi, I'm wondering if anyone can shed any light on this.

I have an original Shaw DCT6208/1000 which started acting up. At first it started randomly restarting itself and then I got the e609,fr1,fr3,hunt,dl etc.. message on the front panel, and now nothing...it's just blank. I tried unplugging/plugging several times but to no avail.

I'm fairly tech saavy so I decided to do a little digging and opened the box up. The first thing I checked was the capacitors (C42, C43, C142, C145) and all are fine with no visible "popping out" symtoms as other users have described. Next I checked that the power supply was indeed supplying power.. verified by the spinning fan that is plugged into the motherboard.

The last thing I checked was the hard drive.. I noticed that that it wasn't spinning even though the power cable was plugged into it. So I decided to unplug the IDE cable from the mainboard and try power again.. and to my surprise it fired up! So it appears as though when the hard drive is plugged into the mainboard it does not supply power to the hard drive!

I am stumped as to how this could be happening, besides the fact that there must be some sort of "switch" somewhere that tells the hard drive when to turn on. I have visually inspected the mainboard for any signs of damage or burns and found nothing.

If anyone has any ideas I would appreciate it! :D

Well, this error has been mentioned previously in the thread http://www.digitalhome.ca/forum/showthread.php?t=23573
, and the error is actually "EB09".

According to WikiBooks (http://en.wikibooks.org/wiki/How_to_use_a_Motorola_DVR/Boot_Error_Codes), the error codes are as follows:

FR1 and FR3 means that it's not getting any cable signal, and it's trying to lock onto a frequency (FR1=75.25 MHz, FR3=72.75 MHz)
Hunt means that it's looking to download software
DL means it's actually downloading the software
EB09 means that the PVR attempted a software download and failed. It will automatically retry periodically.

So, your box is booting up, searching for and finding a signal, finding and attempting to download firmware, and failing, and then repeating this process until successful. There could be several reasons for this, such as if you've got a weak signal, or if there's something wrong with the hardware. However, the front panel indicators do not indicate anything about hardware failure. You mentioned it's a Shaw box. If you have more than one Shaw service, it would still be under warranty (or would have been, until you opened the box). I'd recommend closing the box and scheduling a service call anyway, and if they say you voided your warranty, you might just need to buy a new box.

FWIW, the IDE cable doesn't actually provide power to the hard drive, it provides data and control signals. The power is provided by the 4-pin connector to the power supply.

Thanks for the feedback Tux.

I've done some research on all the error codes and those were the symptoms at first. However now it's just not doing anything at all. No error codes, nothing displaying on the front panel.. it's just blank. No lights either.

That's what led me to believe the power supply had failed but as I mentioned it is supplying power to the mainboard since the little fan is spinning. As well, the 4-pin connector is supplying power to the hard drive, but just not when the IDE cable is plugged into the mainboard at the same time, which leads me to believe that mainboard controls the on/off state of the hard drive, just like on a computer. However there is no "power switch" for these boxes to my knowledge, they are simply "on" when you plug the power cable in (the soft buttons on the front panel do nothing). I have not found and reports of the mainboards failing on these boxes so I suspect there is something else going on here (rather hoping :D).

I doubt Shaw will replace the unit as it is over 5 years old and was previously registered to a different account.

If the unit works w/o the HDD being connected, then it's probably the HDD that's bad. I've seen pc's that won't boot if they have a bad HDD.

The unit does not power on regardless of the hard drive being connected or not. The HD may be bad, but as you said the unit should still show some signs of life.. :confused:

I've seen that problem before. If you can get Shaw to replace it that's your best bet. Otherwise it's probably not worth getting fixed.

There's all sorts of reasons why these units fail, and the DCT6208 was never a great model to start with.