External Hard Drive - Returning DISH customer

icmroadkill

Active SatelliteGuys Member
Original poster
Jan 20, 2010
16
3
Bakersfield, California
We were twenty year subscribers to DISH, but left a few years ago to try to save a few bucks. We restarted our service again in late 2020, but an issue has arisen that needs clarity for me. I have a ton of older content on a few hard drives that I was excited to incorporate. When I connected the first drive, I got a message that it had to be reformatted and I would lose what's already there. I understand the message, if I'm a new subscriber, but I'm not. Anyone know of a workaround that might allow me to access the content on the drives?
 
I understand the message, if I'm a new subscriber, but I'm not. Anyone know of a workaround that might allow me to access the content on the drives?
So far as Dish is concerned, you are a new subscriber since you let your old subscription lapse. Your old account credentials are now lost and gone forever. Nobody knows of a way to regain access to your old EHDs. Sorry.
 
Last edited:
Only one thing to try.
Just a brain fart I had...
Format a new EHD with your new Dish receiver.
Connect your old EHD and the new EHD to a PC running Linux and copy one of the old DISHARC folders to the new drive. I 'm ot sure the EHD even has DISHARC folders, pretty sure the internal one has the programming there.
You might be able to play the recording, but I doubt it.
Others may have already tried this - can you report?
It all depends on whether the drive is encrypted or the individual files.

Read through this thread:
 
Only one thing to try.
Just a brain fart I had...
Format a new EHD with your new Dish receiver.
Connect your old EHD and the new EHD to a PC running Linux and copy one of the old DISHARC folders to the new drive. I 'm ot sure the EHD even has DISHARC folders, pretty sure the internal one has the programming there.
You might be able to play the recording, but I doubt it.
Others may have already tried this - can you report?
It all depends on whether the drive is encrypted or the individual files.

Read through this thread:
The drive is locked to the original account number. Without that account number the material on the drive is dead.
 
It all depends on whether the drive is encrypted or the individual files.
I can confirm that the drive and the folders are not encrypted. Neither are most of the files (JPEG show icons, etc). The only files which are hard encrypted is the recordings themselves.

I used the JPEG images when I copied three of my old EHD's to my new 7TB EHD.

The drive is formatted into X 512gig partitions where X = Drive size in gig / 512. So if you have a 2TB drive, you'll get 4 partitions.

When I was copying from the source to the target, I decided which recordings to transfer and where to place them by just looking inside each folder and opening the JPEG file which showed me the recording folder icon for which show was recorded.
 
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