Western Digital eSATA external Drive - Won't Boot

[JohnGalt]

Hi all, second post with a different issue.

I just had to replace my HR21-700 because the component video wouldn't work (hdmi worked fine, but I want to have it in two rooms and long runs of HDMI is tres $$$). So I got the new one, and of course lost all of the recorded shows. So I said to myself "no sweat, this wont' happen again, grab one of your eSATA enclosures and a 500 gig drive and plug 'er in!" Well the drive works fine in windows, and I cleared all of the partitions on the drive, but when i plug it into the hr21-100 that they gave me (what's the diff between the 100 and the 700? btw) and do a hard reboot, it just sits at the 1 of 2 screen forever (more than 12 hours last night).

Any ideas what I'm doing wrong?

Thanks!

[Greg Alsobrook]

if I were you, I would shut the HR21 down completely... do this by doing a menu reset... and wait on the blue lights to go off... and then pull the plug...

then make sure the esata plug is firmly seated... i'm not sure which cables and/or receiver models this pertained to, but I remember some members reporting having to trim some plastic on the esata cable in order to get it to seat into the receiver firmly... since it worked for you before, this may not apply... buy hey, worth a shot...

also, do you have an ethernet cable plugged into your receiver? some receivers/software versions had an issue where they would hang on step 1 or 2 if there was a network connection present... so if you have it networked, unplug it until after you get it booted...

[feschiver]

Even if you had an external drive you would have lost your shows. What is the transfer rate of the W/D some boxes don't like the high transfer rate.

[JohnGalt]

7200 RPM, 50 meg / sec sustained sequential. IT's their workstation class drive. It's still sitting there after doing the above suggestion of unplugging the ethernet and doing the hard reboot.

Why would I have lost my shows? Wouldn't it just pick up the stuff that was already there? Worst case, I could have stuck it into my windows machine, copied the data off, put it back in the new one, then copied the shows back on, no?

[saxon2000]

One small thing is to be sure to turn on your esata for a minute or two before turning on the HR2*

[Greg Alsobrook]

Why would I have lost my shows? Wouldn't it just pick up the stuff that was already there?

the drive is 'assigned' to the receiver in which it is plugged into... if you were to have your receiver replaced, and you plugged your drive into a new receiver, it would format the drive...

Worst case, I could have stuck it into my windows machine, copied the data off, put it back in the new one, then copied the shows back on, no?

not quite that easy... it can be done... but requires "ghosting" the drive...