external hard drive for s7010pvr not recognized

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Modicum

14 posts

Geek

#63147 21-Jun-2010 21:31

Hi
I am hoping someone can assist me please. I bought a s7010 pvr that did not recognize the 1.5 TB WD elements external HDD. I then contacted dishTV who told me that it was not supported due to its capacity but if I purchased the 1TB version it would work.
I returned the old drive and got the smaller one, swapped from NTFS to exFAT (as instructed in the manual) using the windows 7 quick format option. The drive still shows 'not ready' or 'not recognized' and I have not had further reply from the help desk yet. I also copied the two autorun items (one hidden folder, one hidden file) back to the reformatted drive in case they were needed (and were accidentally erased when I formatted the drive)
I have also gone to the WD website and downloaded a special file for 'using older format fat' but it will not run on my windows 7 machine.
The PVR manual merely said to insert the HDD into the USB and it would work.

Any ideas would be greatly appreciated as this whole freeview thing has become quite costly in terms of time and purchasing parts that are incompatible.

Many thanks

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761 posts

Ultimate Geek

#344429 23-Jun-2010 09:06

The drive will most likely need to be formatted with FAT32 I suspect. You may need a special utility for doing this in Windows.

Wills1

710 posts

Ultimate Geek

#344535 23-Jun-2010 13:27

Swissknife did the trick me me, converting my frive to fat32 for use with our freeview stb

farcus

1152 posts

Uber Geek

#344542 23-Jun-2010 13:51

not sure about your dishtv unit specifically but I know my digistar only supports fat32. Also only up to 500mb partitions, so you may need to create more than one partition on your drive for dishTV to recognise it. Should have been no need to downsize your 1.5TB drive. You could have just created several partitions on it (perhaps 3 x 500MB partitions)

farcus

1152 posts

Uber Geek

#344579 23-Jun-2010 15:55

sorry - earlier post should have read 500gb not mb

found a manual for one of these and the excellent English states . . .

For usility of TIMESHIFT/RECORDING/PLAYBACK function,
USB2.0 storage device is needed basicly. We strongly recommend
user to use USB2.0 HDD, and use independent partition for PVR.
Before using the partition, please format the partition through
the set-top-box.

I would start with partitions of 500gb formatted to fat32 (decrease partition in size if you still can't see them - perhaps 250gb or even 100gb) Then use the stb unit to format each partition as noted above.

cafeg

697 posts

Ultimate Geek

Trusted

#344619 23-Jun-2010 17:35

You definatly have to format the drive to FAT32,
I have a DishTv 7050PVR and I've tried it with NTFS which it worked for a while but after it recorded 4 gig it stopped and said not found.
ExFat definatly doesn't work, i tried that.

I ended up formatting the 500 gig drive into 128gig Fat32 partitions and it works great now, no lockups and records fine.
You can do it at a command prompt like this where X: is your drive letter
format /FS:FAT32 X:
or there are a few utilities out there that will do it also like SwissKnife which is freeware

cafeg

697 posts

Ultimate Geek

Trusted

#344624 23-Jun-2010 17:54

The drive you use also has to have its own power supply as the box won't power it via USB.

Modicum

14 posts

Geek

#344647 23-Jun-2010 19:19

wow- wonderful replies- thank you so much- I will try to grab that Swissknife or failing that I will try the command prompt approach ( One formatted in this way i will be able to partition the drive still?)
You guys are a wonderful resource. I really appreciate it (been hitting my head against getting satellite to work for a month now)

Modicum

14 posts

Geek

#344653 23-Jun-2010 19:40

Ok- I got Swissknife but it is incompatible with windows 7 64 bit. I will try the command line prompt.

cafeg

697 posts

Ultimate Geek

Trusted

#344657 23-Jun-2010 19:45

you could try this one, its supposed to be windows 7 compatible.

http://www.partition-tool.com/personal.htm

You have to partition the drive before you format the partitions.

cafeg

697 posts

Ultimate Geek

Trusted

#344659 23-Jun-2010 19:49

Ahh, just read your post, you have windows 7 64bit.

This one supports win7 64bit.

http://www.partitionwizard.com/free-partition-manager.html

Modicum

14 posts

Geek

#344667 23-Jun-2010 20:13

thanks for that- I have manually installed the partition successfully (split the drive in half effectively) and have installed the program.
When I select format for either partition on the external HDD it gives me only a choice of three NTFS (current) or two things I dont recognise (ex2 and ex3)- According to the help file It should also offer fat 32 (but doesn't seem to)
Sorry this isn't going so smoothly.
Will try the command line suggested

cafeg

697 posts

Ultimate Geek

Trusted

#344668 23-Jun-2010 20:17

this simple one works well for formatting fat32 as well.

http://tokiwa.qee.jp/EN/Fat32Formatter/index.html

its the one I used to format the drive once partitioned on the DishTv box

I don't know if it works on Win7 though..

Modicum

14 posts

Geek

#344983 24-Jun-2010 19:00

ok- I tried the command line prompt after dividing my drive into two partitions.
After around 5 hours it finally finished with the message cannot format hard drive as the volume is too large (or something like that)
Talk about an anticlimax.
I will try your latest recommendation- I tried swissknife on my wife's laptop (win xp) but it got really confused.
sigh
any idea how small the partition needs to be before I can successfully format it using the command prompt line?
(wiki and other sites say that it has about 4 TB capacity - so not sure what is going on here)

Modicum

14 posts

Geek

#344992 24-Jun-2010 19:33

I tried the new program you suggested and it ran fine. Very easy to use, I soon had two partitions created with fat 32 using the quick format option.
I then put a couple of photo- movie and MP3 onto both partitions and replugged it into the set box.
It still says device not supported on the my recorder screen , and device not ready on other screens. I also got one message saying device was removed.
It should be going now- do I need to put back the autorun program onto each partition or leave the PVR on and connected to the HDD for a long period of time- or is there some specific boot up sequence I need to use? ( I tried pvr first, then HDD, then the other way around)
Sorry this is becoming such a mission. The drive and size is supported according to the PVR website (email correspondence) both fat 32 partitions are now under half a tb each. Should i try creating more smaller partitions or is there something else I should be trying?

cafeg

697 posts

Ultimate Geek

Trusted

#344993 24-Jun-2010 19:38

I think the largest partition you can do is 460gig for Fat 32
The reason why I did mine at 128gig as thats the recomended size from the WIKI.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File_Allocation_Table

That other program I said won't go over 460gig FAT32 either and you can get errors on large FAT32 partitions.

http://tokiwa.qee.jp/EN/Fat32Formatter/index.html

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