External hard drive enclosure failed, not the drive.

[LASooner]

So I had a Western Digital My Book external 500GB harddrive that I had hooked up to my Dish 622, I had a bunch of stuff archived on there, primarily old football games that I like to watch on occasion, but the other night when I was transferring something to the drive, half way through it gave me a message that the transfer failed, so I went to manage the drive to see if I had run out of room. It could no longer see it, so I unplugged the USB, rebooted the drive and got the message unsupported USB device. Tried this several times and didn't get anywhere. So I pulled the drive out of the western digital enclosure, put it in to another USB enclosure and when I plugged it in, it sees it as a drive, but says I will have to reformat it to use it. Am I screwed here? I guess the box authenticates the interface and drive, not just the drive.

Anyone traveled down this sad and lonely path?

 

[lucky86]

So I had a Western Digital My Book external 500GB harddrive that I had hooked up to my Dish 622, I had a bunch of stuff archived on there, primarily old football games that I like to watch on occasion, but the other night when I was transferring something to the drive, half way through it gave me a message that the transfer failed, so I went to manage the drive to see if I had run out of room. It could no longer see it, so I unplugged the USB, rebooted the drive and got the message unsupported USB device. Tried this several times and didn't get anywhere. So I pulled the drive out of the western digital enclosure, put it in to another USB enclosure and when I plugged it in, it sees it as a drive, but says I will have to reformat it to use it. Am I screwed here? I guess the box authenticates the interface and drive, not just the drive.

Anyone traveled down this sad and lonely path?

Ask a dish rep send a hit to your 622. The hit should reauthorize it.

 

[RickDee]

The drive may very well be seen as a "new" drive to the 622 because the controller for USB external drives is located inside the external case and if it is a different manufacturer it may be identified as a "new" drive. Getting a "hit" from Dish may not help. You may need to contact Western Digital about obtaining a replacement case.

 

[Laddyboy]

The drive may very well be seen as a "new" drive to the 622 because the controller for USB external drives is located inside the external case and if it is a different manufacturer it may be identified as a "new" drive. Getting a "hit" from Dish may not help. You may need to contact Western Digital about obtaining a replacement case.

I've had the same drive in and out of different cases as well as different Thermaltake caddies and it was always recognized.

 

[Foxbat]

One possibility would be to buy a new external drive for your DVR, let the DVR format it, then take both that new external drive and your old 500 GB drive and mount them under *nix. Looking at the different folders on your good "old" drive, you can copy them over to your "new" drive. It's been years since I did this, but I have been able to copy recordings to a larger hard drive.

You could search the Archive under the Dish Technical threads for Knoppix or posts from mrsmith.

 

[TheKrell]

Anyone traveled down this sad and lonely path?

Yes as a matter of fact. I had a WD15EARS crap out on me, but only in the middle of the disk (middle of 3 large ext3 partitions). I was able to plug it into my favorite Linux distro, let it mount all 4 of the partitions, leave the bad one alone, and copy my surviving programs to another WD15EARS. The 2nd spare disk was already formatted by my 722. Another thing you might try before that strain/pain is to try an fsck on all of the EHD partitions to see if that fixes the "recognition" problem.