External Hard Drive Problems and Discussion - See Facts Link in Post 1.

[rgodel]

message deleted

[FunkyTown]

Today I reformatted the WD10EADS on my Mac. It was never formatted by my new 9242. I wondered if the reason it was shutting down was due to the fact it was formatted by my 9241 and contained shows placed onto it by that machine.

After the Mac formatted it, I plugged it into the new 9242 and it formatted it. After the format all seems fine. I'm able to archive hours worth of programming, and then restore it. It never shuts down now. I hope it remains working.

[Daveysew]

FunkyTown, I'm assuming you used "Disk Utility" to format the drive, what format did you use (OSX Extended / MS-DOS / et al)? I'd like to try reformatting mine and reconnecting it.

Thanks,
dave

[FunkyTown]

I used OSX Extended without journalling. I did this 3 days ago with my old 9242 and it didn't help one bit. Today with the new 9242 it worked fine.

[Pinza]

I wonder if that is because of the new software V185...?

[FunkyTown]

No because the new 9242 came with V184. The hard drive was working fine with V184 all morning. At 1:40 PM I received the V185 firmware and ran tests on the EHD. It still works fine. There must have been something wrong with my first 9242. It never had an issue with the EHD until the V184 update though. However there were graphic issues. Sometimes the orange color would disappear from the guide. Even with V184 the graphics would disappear. They would come back after a reboot or overnight. I had an issue with the HDMI being too bright. My TV could not recognize a 4:3 video and auto stretch because the 9242 had the sides a dark gray instead of black. So I believe it was a faulty 9242 from the beginning.

Losing the season of a couple of shows I guess isn't that bad. I did have a movie "All About Steve" that I rented via PPV and never got to see it. That's gone. I was part of the studio audience on a taping of Saturday Night Live in November and that's gone too.

Oh well. I might get some stuff back through reruns.

[natluc]

Hello
I purchased my external hard drive about 9 months ago and had never experienced the disconnected drive problem. In the past two months (before V184 or 185) I have started to experience the drive disconnecting when trying to watch a show on the external drive. It's to the point now where it seems it always disconnects if I try to watch any show rendering it pretty much useless. V185 has not helped at all.

My question is has anyone who has also experienced this disconnect issue had any success by getting a different hard drive. I am using a 500 GB ReDrive from SimpleTech from Newegg and I am thinking about getting a new 1TB from Lacie to see if it works better.

What is the experience with trying a different drive?
The 9242 works great other than this external drive issue and I would hate to send it back for a refurb when it could have problems of it's own!

Thanks for your feedback

[waterug]

Is the hard drive full? At about 85% capacity some drives become wonky. You could try deleting or restoring a recording to the receiver to see if the problem repeats itself.

[ScaryBob]

I would test the drive on a PC. A non-destructive surface scan might turn up some reliability issues. This can be due to the case, power block or drive. I've had a couple of cheap cases fail when used 24/7 with the 9242. It's a good idea to get a good quality case and drive, not the house brand cases, for this application.

[Mic70]

Is the 7200 RPM rotation speed a must. I notice posters quoting EHD with 5400 RPM speeds, I believe, and having success with these drives. Can anyone confirm they've used a EHD with 5400 RPM with a 6131?

[supergenius]

The EHD that is attached to my 9242 is a 1 TB WD Green drive which is 5400 rpm. No problems at all.

[FunkyTown]

My external hard drive was shutting down on my 9242. I reformatted it using my computer. Then formatted it using the Bell 9242. Since I've done this, I've had no problems with it.

[dmacmart]

We have a WD MyBook - less than 1 TB, I think it's 750 GB but maybe 500. It has been working very well for a year or so, with only a couple of times when it froze and we had to reboot the receiver while watching. No other problems, archiving, deleting, using it. Then a couple of weeks ago, it started misbehaving, maybe around V184 but I'm not sure.

Symptoms:
* click on EHD - shows the correct # hours remaining, but the list is blank
* delete one or more shows - returns immediately, no errors, but nothing is deleted (obviously at a different time than the blank list)
* archive fails, with a dialog box "An error occurred while transferring events to your USB Storage Device"
* after a period of disuse, the access light is flashing like the hard drive is in use but it is not recognized by the PVR
In all cases, unplugging and replugging fixes it, and all shows have been watchable. We have previously NEVER had to restart the EHD in the time we've owned it.

So:
* Is anyone else experiencing these exact problems? We don't have the disconnect while watching that others have reported. (yet)
* Would reformatting it fix the problems? Note: We have way too much TV to catch up on before we can do this.
* Or should we purchase a new hard drive and keep this one and watch the archived shows until it dies?

[arcabuddy]

Many times a day I get the message come up on the screen "USB Hard Drive has been unplugged. The receiver will now restart." I have the 6141 with an Comstar hooked up to it. I have fans blowing in around both the receiver and hard drive so overheating is not an issue. Sometimes the receiver will restart without any message at all. I lose several minutes of TV when this happens and its really starting to bug me, a lot. Anyone got an answer or suggestion as to what may be going on here?

Thanks

[FunkyTown]

This was happening to mine until I completely reformatted the drive and hooked it back up.

Yes I lost several hours of recordings.