Does Charter use SARA firmware? I don't recall hearing of firmware limitations on HDDs on SA equipment and I've spent a fair bit of time on US forums, although most people use larger external HDDs, not internal

Not sure about "SARA", as I just started to try to modify the box a few days ago. This is what I see:

On diag screen 3, it reads:

PTV OS: OS, Home Server CableCARD Edition 1.2
Flash: DVR1.5.3_8300HDC_LR_F.p.4201
App(s): nvia2 v1.9.6.1
hgra v3.3.18

Screen 11 title:

"SARA Information"

Screen 14:

ROM Image: 1.5.3.4201
OS: 6.20.64.1
SARA: 1.90.5.118

I purchased Active Disk Image today and built a boot CD. I will try again tomorrow using it. So far, DD and hardware disk copier both have failed to yield additional space.

I will report back tomorrow night.

Thanks.


Edit: I did use an eSATA for a while, but got tired of hearing the drive running all the time.

The short version: No joy.

I used Active Disk Image today and cloned the drive again (after I wiped the target with zeros, with failures from DD and a hardware disk duplicator).

Plugged in the new drive, connected power, still no more additional space.

The diag screens report:

Page 15:
Drive > Size: 976511024 (correct for a 500GB drive)

Page 24, HDD INFO:
Capacity: 465GB

Page 25, PARTITION INFO:
AVFS: Partition Size 146GB, Free Space 27GB

I then did the warm boot using the remote (from FAQ), the PVR did the hex countdown and I turned on the device after the time display showed up. The device locked up.

I initiated the reboot (volume buttons, info), and the PVR did the hex countdown twice. When the time showed up, I checked capacity again, NO JOY. Grrrr....

What puzzles me is that the PVR "sees" the larger hardware, but is not spanning the drive. Notice the AVFS partition size has not changed...

Any other ideas?

Sorry I am at a loss. Have others from Charter reported success? It is a long shot but try another PATA drive.

I reformatted the new drive, per FAQ, and now page 25 shows 450+GB free.

The only question now is why the device will not use the additional space from the cloned drive, even though it see it.

I would still like to find a solution that allows me to retain the existing recording.

Thanks y'all.

snowman get yourself a linux boot CD like Trinity Rescue Kit.

Read this thread starting at 109.

http://www.digitalhome.ca/forum/showthread.php?p=982455#post982455

snowman get yourself a linux boot CD like Trinity Rescue Kit.

Read this thread starting at 109.

http://www.digitalhome.ca/forum/show...455#post982455

Jake, thanks. The "DD" command I used from post 478 in this thread was in fact from the Trinity Rescue Kit. I also read the post above from 109 onto about 160, but didn't see anything that might be useful for my situation.

The only thing I didn't do is change the cluster size to 64K, but it seems like that doesn't matter for functionality.

I'm really at a loss at this point. I just don't understand why my device won't span the space...

Whoops sorry for being circular. :-)

You are correct. The cluster size will only speed up the transfer slightly.

Just to summarize your case:

1. the clone of your existing drive would not allow the PVR to utilize the entire 500GB.

2. a reformat of the 500GB drive utilized the entire 500GB.

I would keep researching this. You have established the fact your PVR can in fact be upgraded. An inch at a time. :p

I've had this PVR for 21 months and recently started getting disk access errors, then the disk completely died "unrecoverable disk error". I bought the system and only had 1 year warrenty so Videotron wasn't going to change/fix it and I sure as hell didn't want to pay $500 for a new one with only 160G.

This thread and specifically this post with the detailed instructions were GREAT. I now have a fully functional PVR with 4x the disk space I used to have. Thanks to all those who contributed.

btw, Rona has the security bit heads ($14 for a set) and while I couldn't find a Western Digital 500G IDE hard drive locally, I did find a 320G at PC Cyber in Ottawa.

Thanks everyone for your helpful posts. You've provided a lot of information that I can't seem to find elsewhere.

My experience with upgrading the drive seems to be different from most however. I replaced the 160G drive with the WD500AAKB model that people seem to have had a lot of luck with but it didn't work immediately. Even leaving it overnight gave me a error message about the disk when I tried just using a blank disk.

Fortunately my 160G drive was still in a prefail state and I was able to clone it. Once I did that, the 8300HD was able to record again.

I note however that the Linux fdisk program couldn't see any partitions on the 160G drive. This may have been because of it's hardware problems (SMART reporting showed it about to fail) as fdisk also had a message about a problem with partition 4 (despite not reporting any partitions).

I used Gnu ddrescue, which is probably the best tool for the purpose (it's an improved version of ddrescue - see the wikipedia entry). The clone still showed no partitions but the 8300HD seemed happy with it. However I had lost everything that was on it.

My main concern is that the 500G drive didn't initially work. I needed to clone the old drive. This makes me wonder if there are versions of the firmware that require a valid disk image or if it was simply a byproduct of the old (failing) disk drive? Judging from other people's experiences, I'd guess the latter but I'm glad I didn't wait for a disk failure to replace the drive.

BTW: the new drive seems to have cleared up the occasional video breakups I was getting - although the HD History channel looked pretty bad, I'm guessing it was a problem at their end. If people are getting frequent breakups, you may want to put the drive in a PC to check its SMART status.

ALSO: I checked the extended information pages. My SARA firmware is something like 1.89.22. I note also that the full 500G (or 465G anyway) is being used. It's a pity they don't show absolute amounts on the regular device information screens that are available from the remote list function.

I cloned the drive from the OE 160GB to a 500GB Hitachi, using a hardware-based cloaning device doing sector-sector copy.

With the new drive in for the first time, I observed the hex countdown. Upon the first boot, I see all the recorded content, but not more space.


I think cloning the drive at such a low-level is your problem. You are cloning the old physical partition, not just the data, resulting in the new drive having the same size partition. The remainder of the new drive might have unpartitioned space or another partition, which requires formatting.

I remember the program GHOST did allow cloning a drive by two methods:

clone entire drive including physical partitions to the new drive
clone a logical partition to a new (larger) partition on the new drive


Or something like that. You want the second method to take advantage of the full capacity without reformatting.

I notice that some people talk about cloning their SA8300 PVR hard drives. what does this mean? why would you want to clone your hdd?

Let's say you've had an existing SA8300HD for a while and you:

1. Have a bunch of programmes on it that you don't want to lose and you need to replace the internal HDD - say you're getting the message on the PVR "unrecoverable write error" several times - indicating a problem with the drive.
2. Have an index of programmes on it if you have an eHDD that you don't want to lose and you wish to replace the internal HDD.
3. Wish to increase the size of the internal HDD.

You would "clone" this HDD so that the information contained on the original drive is now on the new drive and the SA8300HD behaves just as before, only with a new/larger HDD. Cloning is the only procedure for this.

I've tried many hard drives so far. Forget about Seagate. I kicked in a Western Digital WD10EARS - 1 TB, 64 Megs cache, and it works like a charm. I used the freeware EASEUS Disk Copy to do the disk to disk copy. I can't beleive I tolerate the mozaic for that long.

I did my internal disk upgrade with a WD500AAKB. I tried without cloning at first, and then with cloning. I wanted to make sure the ITFS had the same size regardless of the size of the disk, and it does. I did not see that detail discussed in the forum so I thought I would try it. I did the cloning using the Trinity rescue disk, with dd. I only got a transfer rate of 7.7 Mbps, I wonder if it would have been faster with some explicit large block size. Thanks for all who experimented before me, I always though this would be possible, it was rather easy in the end. I don't understand why anyone would favor the external upgrade solution first. I did my upgrade mostly for the performance issue (glitches in sound and picture) rather than the space need.

This is an FYI ...
I don't know how many others have experienced this, but I was eagerly awaiting the "new improved" guide, which finally arrived a couple of days ago, sadly it's no better that the old one, even my kids find it useless and resort to the old tired IPG. But that's not what prompted this post, it turns out that the upgrade came with a new compression algorithm that re-compressed all our saved shows, so instead of about 99% of 160GB used we now had 62%, the problem was that a few days ago we had 10% used (adding on my 1.5TB external drive), and if you haven't guessed where this is going ... the drive recompression that tagged along with the upgrade omitted EVERYTHING HD on the external drive. Even shows we had scheduled to record thought they were recording fine but only produced blank recordings. I tracked down each one and they all had the same blank recording, but only the HD recordings were affected, all my wife's SD soap opera episodes appear to have remained intact. So I went through the full power down, wait, and power up, and briefly saw a message box that a NEW drive had been detected, but everything else was lost. So despite having a more than adequate UPS, Rogers screwed me from the inside instead.

I plan to replace my external hard drive (from 500 GB to 1 TB). I like to carry over the contents of the current disk to the new one.

I am running Windows XP in my PC and I have Drive Image V7.0 installed. I am wondering if this software can clone the drive. If not, what are my choices?

I attached the PVR's external HDD to my PC. My PC does not detect the external HDD at boot time. Windows therefore does not see this drive and not Drive Image also.

Any suggestions?

Click the link in post 1 on cloning? Search for "clon*" in this thread?

Looks like people here are using EASEUS's Disk Copy to clone HDD of 8300HD with success.

My PC has only one ESATA port so I can only connect one external HDD at a time. Can this work since I prefer not to open my PC. In other words, can Disk Copy write the image to the internal HDD (NTFS) of my PC, then writes the image to the new HDD?