I have a Scientific Atlanta 8300 with Sara PTV OS Home server edition 1.10 Sara 1.89.24.1 and when I connect a Cavarly 500gb external eSATA drive the SC8300 won't boot. It comes on and says boot on the front display but then shuts off and starts booting again and again and never gets past it. This is my dads unit. On my SC Atlanta with Sara (don't know version off the top of my head and I am not near unit at the moment) I can connect the same drive to my machine which is currently running the same Cavalry 500gb drive just fine and my unit came up and asked to format the new drive just fine. what is the deal with my dads SC8300 so that I can get this thing to work. 74gb stock drive just doesn't cut it.

hmmm... maybe something was wrong with your external hard drive.

If that were the case then I think the new drive wouldn't work on my SA8300. Both external drives will work on mine but not on my dads. Only thing, I can think of is is his version of Sara must be different than mine but I wanted to see if anyone out here had experienced this problem before and could let me in on a possible cure. do I need to format this drive on my PC before using in this machine or am I just screwed.