Well excuse me. Why not record something and while recording, pull the cable. Tell us how you do.
Yup you're right. It IS a dish forum. As I understand it and from the actual dish website. You can take a non-dvr receiver and activate the dvr capability by plugging in an external storage device (hdd) and make a phone call and there you have it. Si?
Why do you remove the drive once its connected, number one?
And number two, did you actually dive into the dvr menu and see the dish's nondescript unmount command?
And if you do the deed. Or did it. Do you lose the feature? Or have to call them again when you plug it back in?
English, chinglish. Take it as you may. I can accept you have 'hot-swapped' your ehd. Is it right? Does it cause any corruption? Is a hidden file system check going on in the background when you do plug it back in?
What would happen if you did plug the unplugged-hot drive into a Linux machine and ran a fsck, etc?
Just fortifying the very common practice that people do not realize and which occurs time after time (ie: the cereal bowl effect). There is a correct. Even if not exercised. Method to do it . Let people with phones, pc's, tavveblets, powered on cameras know about......oh hell oops. Its a dish thread.
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arlo - Don't take it the wrong way but you have to take everything into consideration like what the barriers are and what is available to the user. Let's look at the Hopper 3 as the DVR itself. What you may not be aware of is there is no such thing as powering it off unless it was completely unplugged from the wall or plugged into something that has a on/off switch with the switch in the off position as the Hopper 3 will either be in off mode which is really standby mode where the video on the screen will have a screen saver but the box itself will still be recording based on the timers and if the HDMI port is still on to display the screen saver, the USB ports will probably still remain on. So the only difference between the standby which is the off mode and the on mode as far as the DVR goes is when on, the live tv as the channel you are watching has up to a 1 hour buffer and I said up to for a reason because if you went from standby to on, it will only go back to the amount of time after you turned it on and assuming the box was already on, if you change to another channel, the buffer starts from the time you changed to that channel.
As for why one removes the drive once its connected, lots of reasons.... The DVR is buggy. Sometimes while you may see it connected and trying to access the drive on bootup, until you see it show the message that says External Device x connected for each external HDD which can be up to 3 so the x should be 1-3 , do not hit the DVR button to show the DVR screen because if you do, unless either you reboot or unplug, you will only see the External Devices that showed the message up to the point you hit the DVR button which on the screen is a icon that says other devices, that number on the corner will never be less than 1, it can go up to 4 as the 1 is the internal HDD so 2 means internal plus 1 external is detected and available for access. 3 means internal plus 2 external is detected and available for access. 4 means internal plus 3 external is detected and available for access. So assuming you didn't press the DVR button and you waited and all the external HDD leds are now stable but when you press the DVR button and it shows a number that is less than your internal + external drives, you have only two options. One is to disconnect and plug back in each one that did not show up in the list while the DVR is still on. And you are probably going to ask why not restart the DVR first and then plug it back in. So more explanation is needed. The Hopper 3 DVR has 16 tuners so it can be recording up to 16 different things at the same time or you could be watching live either what's on the tuners so if you turned it off, didn't you either lose viewing what you were watching and also interrupted all of the recordings while they are happening. There are other scenarios as unlike your Windows or Linux or whatever computer, the DISH has buggy software so remember I said x above, if it shows the number 4 in the message instead of 1-3 as with the last two software versions, that EHDD will not show up in Other Devices no matter what you do without rebooting. Rebooting means either using the menu, hitting the red reset button similar to the reset switch on your PC or the last one is pulling the power from the AC outlet. Sometimes even those options will not let one or more of the EHDD's get detected after it's booted up so what happens in that scenario is while the Hopper 3 is on and working, you have to disconnect all the EHDD's as no message ever showed up after it stopped the HDD light flashing and now solid, and do reboot without any EHDD connected using the different rebooting methods and after it is on, then you plug all the drives in after it has rebooted and it should then detect the drives but remember not to access the DVR button on the remote until after it's done querying each drive. So unlike the things you mentioned where you have a choice, remember the DVR has limited options and there are no other choices accessible to you as the user since we do not even have a way to check uptime like when it was last rebooted and how much time in years, months, weeks, days, hours, minutes, seconds it has been actually running since the last reboot. To even get the so called unmount option, first someone would have to find a way to hack the DVR and then enable terminal/shell access and then having a way to connect a keyboard or something else to type the commands which is not possible because remember this is what's called a limited closed system where the only access the user has is the GUI interface and what functions are allowed and not allowed from the remote control, nothing else. That's why reading about something whether on the forums or on DISH's website will only give you knowledge but it does not replace the actual hands on personal experience of using that DVR to know exactly how it reacts and what can and cannot be done. And just in case you want to know, if you were recording something or in this case, transferring something to the EHDD and pulled the cable, you wouldn't lose anything because first of all, the original recording will still be on the internal HDD since remember I said earlier that if I was transferring something and it got to 70% and the process hanged, you would assume something like this would happen... the source would have deleted the 70% and only kept the 30% that wasn't transferred if you rebooted while the 70% would be on the destination target EHDD but what happens when you reboot is 100% of the original recording is still on the internal HD, the external HDD would have 0% of the failed transfer as the DISH Hopper 3, what it actually does from what I can tell is it has to finish the transfer where it reaches 100% and then I am sure it does some kind of check to make sure the recording is the same on the source and the target, then delete the original recording on the Internal HDD
before it will come back and tell you it transferred the recording successfully. And I am sure you had read all the posts on the forum, when was the last time ever you heard anyone had a corrupted EHDD or even internal EHDD when the transfers hanged or it came back with a message saying it transferred x recordings with errors. The later really means it is still on the internal HD as a recording and did not actually get transferred to the EHDD successfully and usually in cases like that, rebooting even if using just the menu will fix it so when the DVR is completely on again, you can transfer the recordings successfully without the errors. While somethings are not supposed to work in theory, apparently no one has ever had the issue of recordings failing from pulling the cord even while it was recording. So even with a timer recording, there can be a power outage or DISH forces rebooting of the box. The recording will be viewable and the length of up to the point of when the power or restart was forced so the only bad thing is because it happened while the timer was still running, you get a partial recording and then the DVR will still record if there was a active timer after it powers up again which may be from the beginning of that timer if it is on before the start time or it might start from the time the DVR rebooted if it was after the start time but before the ending time.
So a lot of times, it might depend on the implementation of something as Windows is less tolerant than Unix type OSes any day of the week when it comes to corruption and other things and Unix OSes usually will know the system was not shutdown properly as it was not marked clean so it will do the standard fsck and fix any errors if any as there are plenty of times when even Unix OSes can have a kernel panic which requires hitting the reset button or toggling the power switch and this is on things like IBM RS/6000's running AIX, IBM ES/9000s, DEC Alpha AXP, Sun workstations and servers, PCs running some flavor of Linux, *BSD, QNX and they usually came back without any issues. And this is from dealing with many hundred thousands of systems over the last 33+ years. Other than 2.5" HDD's, all of the HDD failures are always related to it being used while Windows was running. Maybe it's the way the filesystems are designed. So I am sure that the old time users of DISH receivers would know what they are talking about. Yes, I have used DISH for the last 12 years which is still considered new compared to how long some other people have been with DISH before me.
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