New 2.5TB WD Elements EHD showing only 190GB available

[brianmac]

After reviewing which hard drives worked well as an EHD with dish receivers on this site, I purchased a Western Digital Elements 2.5TB. I previously had a 120GB hard drive that worked well for several years, but I wanted larger capacity. I connected the 2.5TB to my VIP622 receiver, the drive was recognized and formatted, then the receiver rebooted. All seemed fine until I started to archive programs to the drive. When I entered the menu to send to the device (DVR, option 6, option 2, option 2) it shows that I only have 190.0 GB available to store programming.

I called Dish customer support thinking that maybe the 2.5TB drive is too large to be supported but they assured me that there is no limit to the size drive that I can connect and that the drive must be bad. I tried connecting the drive to my laptop and indeed it would not recognize the drive so I assumed they were right and returned the drive.

My replacement drive (same WD Elements 2.5TB) arrived today. This time I connected it to my laptop first and it connected showing 2.27TB available. When I plugged it into the VIP622 it formatted and rebooted but still shows only 190.0GB of available recording space.

Has anyone else experienced this problem? I just archived a program to it to see if adding data would decrease the capacity and it did decrease from 190.0 to 189.2GB for a one hour SD program.

Any help would be appreciated. Thanks!

 

[3HaloODST]

622 only supports up to 2TB.

 

[brianmac]

Thanks for the reply. I will have to get a smaller drive. Does anyone know how I can reformat the 2.5TB drive to work with my PC again? I plugged this new drive back into my laptop and it is not recognized by the operating system after having been formatted to the VIP622.

Thanks!

 

[Pepper]

Go to computer management, storage. Find it and delete the existing partitions, then create a new one and format it.

 

[TheKrell]

I am not at all surprised that your receiver couldn't handle a 2.5TB drive. I recently bought 50 3TB Hitachi drives, and I mean to tell you, the number of computers and peripherals that only see 850GB is... Well, it's... I lost count! One box I tried (32-bit Linux system) could see the size correctly, but couldn't actually address the entire disk and wound up corrupting the file system. Not sure but it may be necessary to have fairly recent hardware and 64-bits.

 

[Pepper]

Good point. I have no experience with anything bigger than 2TB. But it worked for OP before so it should again. Possibly he needs some kind of utility from the manufacturer's website.

 

[DishSubLA]

I thought all ViP's were limited to 2GB for external storage (and single HDD not one of those wide enclosures that actually house TWO drives). Are you all saying that the 722, 722K, 922 are not limited to 2GB? That would be good news.

 

[Lord_Vader]

I don't know if it would work, but you might want to try....

Hook it back up to your PC. Create a 2 TB FAT32 partition. Maybe even format it as well. Then connect it to the DVR. It may not work at all, but just a thought.

 

[TheKrell]

FAT32? The DVRs create multiple (at least2) ext3 partitions.

 

[Lord_Vader]

FAT32? The DVRs create multiple (at least2) ext3 partitions.

I figured that Dish is some linux variant, but I was thinking that it there was a readable partition it might just assume the partiton and format it instead of setting a new one up. Most likely not, but thought it might be worth a couple of minutes to try. I figured FAT32 is universal unlike NTFS. I guess the OP could boot from a live DVD and try to format it that way, but that's more work.

 

[harshness]

Hook it back up to your PC. Create a 2 TB FAT32 partition. Maybe even format it as well.

The limit on formatting a FAT32 partition using Disk Management is 32GB with Windows XP and later.

The key lies not in creating partitions but deleting the partitions that the DVR installed on the drive. Once the partitions are gone, you can pretty much do what you want on the computer side.

 

[patels1995]

Dish Reciever hardrive

Same problem with me how do i get it so my hard drive can be recognized by my computer is there any way to configure it through the dish reciever

 

[dfergie]

Welcome to SatelliteGuys, moved post to this thread, no way to configure it from your receiver for your pc, but go into computer management > Disk management as stated earlier in this thread, then format ...