I had a vip211 which I paid the $40 for the external hard drive option and everything has worked fine for a couple years. Unfortunately the over the air tuner died on the 211 and Dish sent me a 211K replacement unit. When I hook the external hard drive to the 211k, it takes about 30 seconds and I can hear the hard drive making a sort of clicking sound and then a message pops up on the screen saying there is a problem using that hard drive to try another. I have 2 other brands of external hard drives that I tried and they both give the same error. I can hook up the old 211 to the original external hard drive and it has no problem with the hard drive and I can see all my old recordings. My question(s) are, my external hard drive does not have a separate power supply but that caused no problems on the original 211 and the 211k is supplying power to the drive because I can hear it clicking but I wonder if the lack of a external power supply might be more problematic on the 211k. I contacted dish and the rep said there was an open issue with external drives with the 211k, and to try it again in a couple days because they should be working on a software update for the 211k. It's now been a few days later and I hooked the 211k up and let it do it's daily system reboot/update but the problem still persists. I've learned not to entirely trust info given to me by Dish support and wondered if anyone here has any insight into my problem.
Bob
Bob
