Hello,

I just got new cable service form Cincinnati Bell in my area(I guess they bought a cable company last year) and I got a cisco explorer 8540HDC as my box.....with only 20 hours of storage :confused: so I called them, they seemed to think that an external hard drive would work. I can hook up it, the box does recognize it and says it is compatible, but my storage space did not increase and it didn't ask me to format it. Any ideas? I am currently formatting it on my computer to see if maybe that will "force" it to format and maybe recognize it for use? Any ideas if that doesn't work?

Thanks,

Bentov

**Update**

I formatted the hard drive, but no change in it's behavior. It says that it will work, but doesn't ask me to format, and not increase in storage. I will try to record a lot tonight and see if I can go past its barrier of 20 hours.

Bentov

** Update 2 **

Well I did some additional poking around and went into the diagnostic mode. (Holding down the pause until the envelope appears). There are 63 pages of information and I can see that the box definitely sees the external hard drive and oddly enough, it seems to have formatted it own it's own. I see references to avfs and itfs or something along those lines, but I formatted it ntfs, so it seems to already have different files systems, or it is maybe reading the other drive(need to verify which drive it is seeing). A lot of information, but all of the screens seemed to be read only. I don't know how new these boxes are, but I cant seem to find that much information on them.

Bentov

** Update 3 **

Ok, the files systems are definitely for the internal drive. I was able to get to the screen to format the drive(s) hdd1, hdd2, hddf. I must have formatted hddf by mistake and when it finally came back(I thought I killed it) all of my dvr programs and scheduled programs were gone. So I'm making progress, but I don't think that I'm going to try to format hdd1 or hdd2 until I know for sure.

I'm running SARA 1.90.16.1


** Update 4 **

Well, I'm over 20 hours now recorded, and I'm only at like 36% or something along those lines; so I guess it is using it, but I don't understand how since it didn't ask me to format it. I'm just going to keep recording and see what happens. I don't know if it makes sens for it to think that it is recording something in HD, but in actuality only record the SD?