Move programs to new external hard drive

Zamboknee

Member
Original poster
Jul 7, 2012
9
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Des Moines
I have an external hard drive with my Dish receiver. It's been acting up (stuttering/stalling on playback of recorded programs) so I'm gonna have to move the programs on it to a new drive.
My question is: how do I move the already recorded programs onto a new hard drive?
Can I move them to my computer for staging and, when the new drive is formatted, move over to the new drive?
 
No. You must move them from the EHD to the receiver and then onto the new EHD.

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Move as many as the Receiver will hold and then switch to the new EHD and upload the movies to the new EHD and then repeat the move until the old EHD is empty.
 
I have a 211k receiver. How do I move the programs?
AH! Now we're dealing with a horse of a different color. You'll need to clone your drive. Hopefully it will last long enough to do so. As to which product to use, I will defer to others with more current knowledge than I.
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I have a 211k receiver. How do I move the programs?

Whole different story. You can't move them at all. What you have on there is gone.... The 211 EHD makes the 211 receiver a DVR. This is no different than having a VIP DVR or Hopper without an EHD that has a hard drive failure.
 
Yes, but how many people have such skills and Linux?

I have used the freeware Scientific Linux 5.x DVD, booted it up on my main Windows computer, logged in as root, connected two drives, and dragged/dropped. Seems pretty easy to moi. I've also installed ext2fs on my Windows computer, and done it that way too.

Note that I specified the older version 5 of Scientific Linux (a repackaged Red Hat Enterprise Linux). More recent versions of liveCDs don't let you log in as root, which spoils the ease of dragging and dropping the program folders, because ownership of the files on the new disk gets messed up. I believe Ubuntu does the same darn thing. Fixing ownership nonsense takes some facility with the Linux "chown" and "sudo" commands ex post facto. :( Best just to use 5.x and log in as root.

I have a 211k receiver.

Well why didn't you say so in the first place? It may still be possible to copy program folders from one disk to another, because I believe the file system is still ext3. But I have not tried that particular maneuver since I have no 211-series receivers.
 
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I have used Acronis cloning software with success and believe any cloning package should work (i.e. Norton Ghost, Spotmau Cloning etc...)
 
Back when the ViP 211 EHD support was first introduced, I started with a spare 250 GB SATA drive and a USB drive adapter to satisfy me it was worth spending the $150 or so for an external WD 750 GB drive. After I was satisfied and getting the WD drive, the issue was I didn't want to lose anything I had recorded on the 250 GB drive.

I used a CD-ROM based Linux called Knoppix to do the copying. You need to let the 211 format the new drive for EHD operations first and then, as was suggested, log into root and drag-n-drop the contents of each partition from the old drive to the same partition on the new drive.

If the new drive is the same size as the failing drive then use a disk cloning tool to do a sector-by-sector copy. It should be a lot faster.
 
Get a USB hub (usually 4 port) and you will be able to off load your receiver's entire hard drive to a new XHD. You will then be able to transfer your failing drives content to the receiver, then off load that content to the new external HD. Repeat as necessary until your failing drive has been emptied. With a USB hub it is only a matter of turning drives on and off. This is the easiest way and with the USB hub you can have multiple external hard drives, but only one powered up at a time.
 
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Hopper with sling and Netgear neo

Newbie...sorta lost

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