[Guest]

Hello,

I hav a DishPlayer 7200 and I upgraded its OEM 17 gig hard drive with a bigger, 123.5 Gig Hard Drive.

However, I am only getting 25-30 hours of record time from this. I expected to get 60-100 hours.

Does anyone know why DP only reconizes the first ~30 gigs of this HD and how I can go about getting it to reconize the rest of the drive?

Let me know... Thanks,

Jason
[email protected]

 

[Guest]

someone asked me questions about the problem, and in case someone else has the same questions, I will post me answer here:

I selected about 100 hours of shows to record over the next week, and I noticed after the second day that the first few shows I recorded had disappeared. I totaled up the hours recorded and was at about 28 hours.

I watched it for the next couple of days, it continues to record new programming and erase the oldest stuff as it goes, always hovering around 30 hours of recorded material on the drive.

I am recording movies, a lot of TV movies and some Pay Per View. It seems I get less recording time when I record the Dolby Digital PPVs vs. the free TV Movies on HBO and such.

I was thinking maybe the BIOs does not support over ~35 gigs? Doesn't sound like this is the case if people are getting 80 Gigs working... I am using an IBM DeskStar 123.5 GB HD, I paid a little extra for the IBM brand because I thought it would be most compatible with the DP. I heard some models of Maxtor and other brands are really Quantum drives, which don't work in the DishPlayers. To avoid the risk of ending up with a Quantum drive, I went to IBM, since they never used that technology.

If anyone has any ideas for me, please let me know. I am hoping it isn't the BIOS, as I assume the BIOS is proprietary and I can't upgrade it without hacking the BIOS, and I done feel like writing my own BIOS software right now .

Well, any help would be appreciated.

Regards,
Jason
[email protected]

 

[David_Levin]

You might want to recheck the drive jumpers. Don't some have things like cylinder limit options to keep them back compatible with older PC BIOS?

How did you do the upgrade? Did you use disk image or do the WEBTV download (WEBTV download is easier)?


Off the Wall Ideas:

You sure the drive was new? Perhaps there was some partition information on it that is confusing the dishplayer (plug the drive into a PC and see if fdisk sees anything - zero out the drive and reinstall in Dishplayer)?

Perhaps there's a problem with the drive. Maybe something silly like it's mislabeled? Plug it into a PC, let the BIOS scan it, and see what it reports.

 

[Guest]

You might want to recheck the drive jumpers. Don't some have things like cylinder limit options to keep them back compatible with older PC BIOS?

It is set as master, device 0... there is also an option for master, device 0, disable automatic spin.. but i didn't try that disable spin jumper setting.

did you do the upgrade?

WebTV download

You sure the drive was new?

It came sealed in IBM shrink wrap...

Perhaps there was some partition information on it that is confusing the dishplayer (plug the drive into a PC and see if fdisk sees anything - zero out the drive and reinstall in Dishplayer)?

I'll take a look over the weekend

Perhaps there's a problem with the drive. Maybe something silly like it's mislabeled? Plug it into a PC, let the BIOS scan it, and see what it reports.

I'll check this out over the weekend too.

 

[cnsf]

I seem to remember reading the max was about 80 GB using a WD drive. Check out the Ben Reser site for compatible drives and upgrade instructions.

http://ben.reser.org/dishplayer

Try to zonk out the partitions and do a disk integrity check (ScanDisk, DiskDoctor) and see how that goes.

 

[David_Levin]

Don't mess with automatic spin. Seems like you did it right.

Looking at the jumpers for the Deskstar 120GXP (though I don't know for sure this is what you have)...

http://www.storage.ibm.com/hdd/support/d120gxp/d120gxpjum.htm

Looks like the default jumpers of G-H and A-B would be fine. If you jumper G-H & D-B you activate a 33.8 Gig capacity clip (which might give you 25 hours of recording time).

In the past people have reported a loss of drive capacity after a software update. Reforcing the WebTV download would fix it. Doesn't seem likely since you just downloaded the software. Generally the download is not the latest version and the current software comes from the 3am download. A long shot might be some problem occured when the software updated (if it did).

I hope you haven't discovered an incompatible drive. All I can say for sure is that my Western Digital 120 gig is working fine (I can total up the recorded hours when I get home).

 

[Guest]

thanks for all the info david, I am going to open it up and double check my jumper settings. I wont have time till this weekend, but I will let you know.

-Jason