DCT6412 Hard Drive Upgrade? [Text View]

alexburke

01-16-05, 04:29 AM

Has anyone tried souping up a DCT6412 by upgrading its hard drive?

A few mandatory notes to make sure there are no misunderstandings, since these forums seem *very* well read:
(1) I am located in Canada. It is a violation of the Criminal Code of Canada to tamper with equipment to steal cable service (actually, doing anything to steal service is a criminal offence). What I'm doing is *NOT* to steal service, but *ONLY* to allow the DCT6412 to record MORE *legitimately acquired* programming than it can when shipped from the Motorola factory.
(2) I do not want to copy any content off the hard drive for use anywhere else. My only intention is to display the content (more of it!) with a TV connected to my DCT6412. Furthermore, I do not wish to share the content with anyone, anywhere, anyhow.
(3) I do not condone opening a cable box you don't own. I own this DCT6412 (it was purchased outright from my cable company), so I firmly believe I have the right to do this.

Okay, with the legal stuff out of the way, the two DCT6412 units I've laid eyes upon both have a 120GB Seagate 5400rpm "Consumer Electronics"-grade hard drive in them. I replaced the hard drive in mine with a brand-new Western Digital 250GB 7200rpm hard drive. I expected the unit to reject it, because it wasn't formatted (as the unit was expecting it to be, or even at all); it was fresh out of the static bag. However, to my surprise, it seemed to initialize it and use it just fine for recordings!

The attached image indicates that the unit seems to have a capacity of 120 GB hardcoded in its firmware (8.12, if I recall correctly), yet has allocated just a hair over 149 GB to its various partitions. This indicates there doesn't seem to be a 137GB limitation (caused by the 32-bit LBA addressing limit at ~137GB in some older PCs and similar platforms), since the "PVR Content" partition is ~144GB in size by itself. The IDE interface is provided by an ALi M1543C-B1 southbridge, which dates from ~1998, making it ANCIENT by PC standards. (This is almost certainly the same component which provides the box's two USB 1.0a interfaces.)

Why Motorola chose to go with such an ancient IDE interface is absolutely beyond me, other than perhaps that they got a VERY good deal on them (but what would a newer southbridge have cost in volume, really?!)

Extensive Googling has not revealed whether or not the ALi M1543C-B1 component supports 48-bit LBA or not, but judging by its age, my guess is that it does not. However, the attached screenshot seems to indicate it doesn't *properly* do so. The age of ALi's press release (apparently this part went into volume production in Q1 '98) also makes me leery of the device's ability to address more than 137 GB of any hard drive installed in the unit.

I have been a PC technician, consultant, programmer, etc for >10 years, and this sort of stuff doesn't faze me in the least (even mounting the original disk in a PC, poking around the disk in a hex editor to look around). Otherwise I wouldn't be trying it! (One note for the PC-aware: the drive contains a nonstandard partition table -- ending in 0x56AB, somewhat amusing when the "standard" one ends in 0x55AA. No partitions are defined there, but sector 0 is anything but blank.)

However, the unit wasn't stable -- after a few hours of recording HD content with the TV turned off, I would return and turn the TV on, to be greeted by a black screen. The hard drive's heads weren't chattering, indicating it was no longer recording. Pressing STOP then DOWN then OK, which is normally required to stop recording with the Prevue software my cable company uses (which is total garbage, but that's another matter), didn't do anything -- and I wasn't able to change channels or cause the unit to respond by pressing any keys (no menu, guide, or other overlay of any sort). The unit was acting strangely, like it had lost its mind.

After unplugging the unit's power cord and plugging it back in, pressing the "recording list" button indicated no recordings were stored; this leads me to believe the filesystem had become corrupt (or was originally, since that drive was never formatted at the Motorola factory). However, recording 4 or 5 short clips then power cycling the unit did NOT result in the loss of the recordings -- only when the unit "blew a gasket" as described above were the recordings lost.

So, I plan to try again with a brand-new Seagate 160GB 7200rpm hard drive -- first new, then with the image of the original 120GB hard drive copied into the beginning of the 160GB unit (leaving blank space at the end, which ideally would be detected and used).

Any ideas? Thoughts? Others trying this, or thinking about it? Please let me know, either by PM or preferably by replying to this post!

Thanks in advance...

alexburke

01-21-05, 04:50 AM

Someone asked me a couple of questions. Here are snippets of their questions, followed by my replies:

"But since you said these partitions are non-standard, do you think Ghost can even read the original partitions on the 120gb drive?"

It won't touch it -- *all* PC operating systems "sign" the MBR (sector 0), where the partition table is stored, with "55 AA" at the end of it. The 6412's is signed with "56 AB".

In addition, no partitions are defined in the normal places, but the MBR itself is not blank.

To be precise, there are non-zero values between offset 0x102 and 0x13C -- which, on a PC, mean nothing. The rest of the MBR, other than 0x1FE and 0x1FF (again, 56 and AB), is zeroes.

It's quite possible that the partition table is there, rather than in the "right place" -- I will test out that theory soon. It *is* approximately the same amount of data...

"So basically my goal was to mirror the 120gb drive over to the 250gb drive, leaving everything the same except the size of the partition that actually contains PVR data."

Not going to happen, that I can see. Not only that, but I'm quite certain that ALi component doesn't do 48-bit LBA, meaning large disks (>137 GB) are out of the question.

Furthermore, none of the partitions on the disk are of a common filesystem -- although references are made to GPFS, which may or may not be the same GPFS invented by IBM (a high-performance filesystem for mainframe applications).

alexburke

01-21-05, 05:36 AM

Top-quality late-night Googling turned this up this juicy morsel:
http://www.opencable.com/downloads/specs/OC-SP-OCAP-DVR-I01-040524.pdf

alexburke

01-21-05, 05:42 AM

This may or may not be the GPFS used in the 6412:
https://www-1.ibm.com/industries/media/doc/content/bin/GPFS-AShared-DiskFileSystem_1.pdf

5*General

02-01-05, 05:38 PM

I have a Maxtor 4r120L0-QV 120g, in my Moto 6412 and I am looking at a Maxtor 5a300j0-QV 300g, (QV=Quickview) a 5c drive.

I have seen them on pricegrabber.com for as low as $213.00-$250.00

Just info :)

zeroendless

02-01-05, 06:54 PM

alexburke,
Thanks for the update, keep up the 'good' work!!

Bill

02-02-05, 03:26 PM

Far easier to simply rent two and you get 4 tuners. :) However, happy tinkering.

zeroendless

02-02-05, 05:35 PM

NO the same, Bill.....

i got two and don't mind another 3 or 4 but if i could just bump one of them to 400GB, that would be great. Then, i don't have to clean up the room every single day for another program. No worries over wrong remote control over another. I deleted wrong program forgotten both were on at the same time, yike! That happend few times before...

walford

02-02-05, 08:08 PM

The rumor is that the upgrade to the 6412 to support additional HDDs via the USB port will be released by summer. That should resolove the issue, however, not all standard PC hard drives may be eligable since the HDD manufacturers used to make drives just for the DVR market that used less power (less heat) and which could have their read after right check disabled to increase throughput rates to what DVRs required since a dropped bit is not a big deal to a video recording and not all current retail drives may provide this capability.

rlsmith

02-02-05, 08:52 PM

It would surprise me if the cable companies would allow you to connect a random USB drive to the STB. I would think this would raise maintenance concerns, and in addition they would want to profit from an upgrade opportunity (i.e., they will charge more).

rogo

02-03-05, 03:27 AM

".... and not all current retail drives may provide this capability."

Yes they do. People have used whatever drive they've found to upgrade Tivos and Replays and have not had any problems.

walford

02-03-05, 09:47 AM

Originally posted by rogo
".... and not all current retail drives may provide this capability."

Yes they do. People have used whatever drive they've found to upgrade Tivos and Replays and have not had any problems.
Thats why I said "may" and not "do"
There have been recent announcements (CES show) by Maxtor and Seagate of new drives made specifically for PVR add ons which is the reason for my caution. It is true that these new drives may only be quieter than the standard ones to make them more acceptable for the PCR market.
I too have previously upgraded a D* Pvr with a retail drive and had no trouble.

shooks

02-03-05, 06:22 PM

alexburke,
Thanks for digging into this. I'm glad to see someone is working on it.

Do you know if the IDE controller will support 2 drives? That seems to be a standard feature of IDE controllers. The fact that the diagnostic menu tells you how many drives are installed leads me to beleive it may support more than 1. Maybe if you install a 2nd 120GB drive it will format/initialize it and work. It would probably require switching the IDE cable or getting some kind of IDE splitter.

What do you think? It's worth a try...

jacmyoung

02-04-05, 03:03 PM

Give me a 400GB drive I will slap it in and try for anyone who is curious:)

WiFi-Spy

02-15-05, 02:12 AM

any updates?? :)

Fresco

02-25-05, 04:32 PM

Hi everyone,
I just recentrly purchased a moto 6412 off ebay (without doing enough research ahead of time) so now I have a cable box with no GI number. For those who have gone to the trouble of opening up their 6412, would you be able to tell me if there's a sticker (or perhaps a stamp) of the GI number on the inside of the casing somewhere? I'm wondering if it's worthwhile opening mine up.
Thanks in advance.

Paul Clancy

02-26-05, 09:57 AM

No number on the bottom? Sounds like a "hot" deal.

Paul Clancy

02-26-05, 11:01 AM

BTW regarding the external hd option ...does the 6412 have a usb 2 port ? My 6208 has usb 1.1 and firewire. Would usb 1.1 provide enough throughput to dump hd to an external drive? I doubt it. An external firewire drive would be more likely.

5*General

03-02-05, 08:17 AM

Originally posted by Fresco
Hi everyone,
I just recentrly purchased a moto 6412 off ebay (without doing enough research ahead of time) so now I have a cable box with no GI number. For those who have gone to the trouble of opening up their 6412, would you be able to tell me if there's a sticker (or perhaps a stamp) of the GI number on the inside of the casing somewhere? I'm wondering if it's worthwhile opening mine up.
Thanks in advance.

Does it have a S/N on it, or any other numbers

Call Motorola at 1-877-466-8646,
1.) Ask them if they ever sold one without a GI number?
2.) Ask if there is a GI number in side of it.

Does it work? (hooked up to cable (cox/comcast))

eMail the seller and ask them why it does not have a GI number, and ask them if it is HOT (ouch).
eMail ebay with the problem and ask for there help.

moyekj

03-02-05, 05:28 PM

Haven't tried this personally, but for someone willing to try this could be a way to accomplish a hard drive upgrade:

Step 1 - Clone filesystem from original drive onto your new drive
1. Download Slackware Linux boot image and make a boot floppy using PC
RAWRITE (Win XP version)
http://ncart.scs.ryerson.ca/pub/slackware/slackware/bootdisks/RAWRITEXP.EXE

BOOT IMAGE (Slackware)
http://ncart.scs.ryerson.ca/pub/slackware/slackware/bootdisks/bare.i

Open a CMD window under WindowsXP and type:
RAWRITEXP.EXE bare.i a:

2. Pull out the 6412 IDE hard drive
3. Pull out master hard drive from PC and replace with 6412 drive
4. Insert another new higher capacity hard drive as a slave to the 6412 drive
5. Boot up PC with Slackware Linux boot disk
6. Clone 6412 drive to slave drive from command prompt as follows:
dd if=/dev/hda of=/dev/hdb bs=16K
7. Pull cloned drive from PC and set it back to master and then insert in 6412 and check that 6412 can boot up.
If this works OK then the 6412 will boot up normally and should behave no differently than with the original drive - note you will not have additional recording space yet since this is an exact clone of the original drive.

Step 2 - Factory reset the 6412 with your new drive in place
1. DCT6412 should be turned on
2. Press Cable, Power off, Select, Select to bring up Diagnostics Page
3. With diagnostics page showing press Replay, DVR, DVR, DVR, Live (or Replay, LIST, LIST, LIST, Live)
4. 6412 now should show "Clr" in the LED display.
5. Press Select to proceed with the reset (and presumably Exit to cancel).
6. The 6412 should now reset and download a bunch of data from the headend

Hopefully following the factory reset the unit now has re-partitioned the hard drive to take advantage of it's full size.

Like I said, I haven't tried any of this but thought I would post it here for "brave" souls to try.

smyrna

03-03-05, 03:29 AM

just another suggestion has anyone tried to just hook up a slave 120 to it just to at least double recording space?

moyekj

03-03-05, 09:35 AM

smyrna, that was going to be my next suggestion:
1. Hook up a second hard drive (I think size doesn't matter, but keep it <= 120G in case bigger drives are not supported) as a slave to the first - setting jumpers accordingly on the second drive
2. Boot the unit back up and factory reset as outlined in step 2 in my previous post in this thread.
3. Enter diagnostics page:
Turn unit on
Cable, Power off, Select, Select
Go to module d13 (PVR/HDD Status) and check the information there to see if it worked.

scooterboy

03-04-05, 08:47 AM

Originally posted by moyekj
Haven't tried this personally, but for someone willing to try this could be a way to accomplish a hard drive upgrade:

[snip]

Hopefully following the factory reset the unit now has re-partitioned the hard drive to take advantage of it's full size.

Like I said, I haven't tried any of this but thought I would post it here for "brave" souls to try. So where did this procedure come from? Did you make it up? You say you haven't tried it but has someone else?

moyekj

03-04-05, 05:40 PM

Originally posted by scooterboy
So where did this procedure come from? Did you make it up? You say you haven't tried it but has someone else? Yes I made these up and as far as I know nobody has tried these. These are some things I would try myself if I owned the 6412 outright instead of leasing it from the cable company. Since I don't own the box I'm not able/willing to try these myself (since it involves opening the case and breaking the seal). I'm not claiming any of these would actually work - just trying to spark some ideas for anyone that is willing/able to try a disk space upgrade, which is the main theme behind this thread. I think there are some users that actually own their own 6412 box instead of leasing from a cable company (for example Shaw cable in Canada ) so there may be volunteers from that camp able/willing to try something.

scooterboy

03-04-05, 05:57 PM

Originally posted by moyekj
Yes I made these up and as far as I know nobody has tried these. Oh ok, I just didn't think that was made clear in your post. Usually when this type of mod instruction is posted, it's after it's been proven to work. I didn't want anyone to assume this procedure had worked, screw up their 6412 trying it, and wonder why they now had a Motorola doorstop.

:D

moyekj

03-05-05, 10:14 PM

Bump.

Whiteblazer01

03-14-06, 03:18 AM

has anyone got this to work yet? I had a customer that upgraded his hard drive in his Tivo box, so I wanted to upgrade my dct-6412 box. I mod xboxes and put higher capacity hard drives in there, so I would like to do the same to my dvr box. :D :D

cooljoe04

08-28-06, 11:58 PM

As a preface, I would like to give a brief description of my background. I am new to this forum. I am also a computer nerd, for lack of a better description, who has moved into cutom home theatres installations. My main background is networking, this is why I will get into detail about the networking later. I have noticed as a generality, computer people do not do home theatre, and home theatre people don't do much with computers. I am lucky enough to be bridging that gap. I am hoping a few computer people will read this as well as the many HT readers in here will. My co-workers understand home theatre which I have been learning through them for the last year+, and I handle the networking. We are just starting to do some Control4 installations (Control4,com) which work out great for me, as they utilize both HT and networking.

I would like to start off by stating that I do not own my cable box. Opening it is not an option, thus drastically limiting what I can do. I have read through the forum thus far and am glad that I am not the only one not satisfied with the boring old 6412's options and wanting to spruce it up a bit. I have seen a lot of information as to adding additional hard drives via IDE, etc. But I have not seen any questions pertaining to the USB or ethernet jacks driectly.

I would like to find a way to either add an additional hard drive via the USB for increased storage, or have the ability to pull information off of my cable box onto my PC to free up room for additional recording. It is not my intent to reproduce or sell any of the information. Just simply to get it off of the DVR's drive without losing it, to allow for more recording. With a USB port, ethernet port, and serial ATA port all installed in this DVR, this seems like it should be pretty easy, but I have had many problems so far.

After reading the motorola website's information on the cable box, I gathered that the 6412 has an integrated cable modem designed for future use. This explains the ethernet jack and a possible use for the USB.

I have been told by the local cable company that the USB port, SATA port, as well as the Ethernet jack have all been diabled. To a certain degree, I believe this, but at the same time, I don't. I must test it for myself to find the true answer. I have tested everything but the SATA port, as I do not have a SATA drive or card in my PC. Below are my tests.

To test, I took an ethernet cable and plugged it into the cable box, and the other end into a network switch which all my computers are conencted to. When I plug into the network switch, all three lights on the switch light up signifying that it has a link, connection, and activity with the box. At my house, I have both DSL and Cable internet. I looked at the DHCP clients for the cable and DSL routers both to see if the cable box it pulling an IP from the routers. Neither showed the box as a DHCP user. This tells me that the cable box has a static IP address; however, I do not know what it is! Obviously the network jack has SOME sort of function or it would not be showing a connection to my switch, meaning it is not disabled entirely. Does anyone have any idea how this jack works, or what the IP address is if it WILL work? Or if I can copy media through it? Or if I can even program the box through it?

Next, I have interpreted from the forum that the USB port on the 6412 is simply a 1.1 rather than a 2.0 which poses a problem for fast dumping of media. A question I did not see answered anywhere though, is the USB an input only to the cable box for an additional hard drive, or a output only of the cable box to allow a connection to a PC for instance, or will it support 2-way communications? It is seeminly disabled as an output as I can get no connectivity to my PC, but I have not tried it with a USB hard drive thus far to see if it will work as an input.

I suppose the biggest question of all, is assuming that the cable company is not lying to me about all the afore mentioned jacks being disabled, is there any kind of programming that I can get into externally to enable the USB, ethernet, or SATA on my box?

Any help on the topics would be a help. Thanks in advance.

scanpa

08-29-06, 12:44 AM

Sunil

08-29-06, 05:04 PM

Comcast will not be enabling the eSata port till they fix a software issue that has to do with copy protection & encoding / encryption for external data storage.

Any idea when that will be?

Thanks
-s

markm75

02-27-07, 03:17 PM

Has anyone ever been able to upgrade or addon another harddrive in this unit yet (In a "rented" unit from comcast)...

scanpa

02-27-07, 03:34 PM

Has anyone ever been able to upgrade or addon another harddrive in this unit yet (In a "rented" unit from comcast)...

Not possible, Comcast does not currently enable the eSATA port, the headend would have to activate the eSata port and enable external HDD options in the firmware.

markm75

02-27-07, 03:35 PM

Not possible, Comcast does not currently enable the eSATA port, the headend would have to activate the eSata port and enable external HDD options in the firmware.

So I guess, just "temporarily" removing the existing HDD and cloning it onto a bigger size drive wouldnt work either then?

ghackaray

02-28-07, 12:30 PM

markm75

02-28-07, 12:40 PM

I am with Shaw cable and have a DCT6412 III which I purchased on eBay. I upgraded the 120GB Seagate with a 160GB Seagate. That is an increase of 33%. I would liked to have installed a larger drive, but from all my research I found that the existing firmware will not recognize anything larger than 160GB. I have heard of people installing larger drives, they work but still only show 160GB.

Also, I could not clone the old drive as they use some non-standard operating system/partitioning? So I left the unit open and would swap the drives back and forth until I had finished watching my old recordings while I put new recordings on the new drive.

So if you were to return the unit to shaw.. you'd basically just replace the original HDD unit and they would have no idea the unit was opened/modified?

IE: if i did this with my comcast unit, would they have anyway (or care) of knowing a change was made?

Also.. with purchased units off ebay, would comcast allow me to use the new box (if i returned the old one).. and would they still charge me the rented fee of 9.95 per month?

Finally, what is the process for putting in the new drive.. do you just take a brand new (formatted) drive and put it in and it magically will then work, or are there other steps involved. And does this unit take SATA drives internally or are the IDE, as I do have a 400gb SATA drive lying around that I could swap if it would work.

Thanks

scanpa

02-28-07, 02:47 PM

So if you were to return the unit to shaw.. you'd basically just replace the original HDD unit and they would have no idea the unit was opened/modified?

IE: if i did this with my comcast unit, would they have anyway (or care) of knowing a change was made?

Also.. with purchased units off ebay, would comcast allow me to use the new box (if i returned the old one).. and would they still charge me the rented fee of 9.95 per month?

Finally, what is the process for putting in the new drive.. do you just take a brand new (formatted) drive and put it in and it magically will then work, or are there other steps involved. And does this unit take SATA drives internally or are the IDE, as I do have a 400gb SATA drive lying around that I could swap if it would work.

Thanks

The new Phase 3 64xx & all of the 34xx series have a device inside that keeps track of the number of times the lid has been removed. There is also a Sticker on both sides of the Frame, it has to be cut to open the cover, and if the cable company finds this cut, they will charge your credit card the full price of the unit.

Also in the US, you must rent them from the MSO, as the STB are not available to the end user for purchase. Comcast WILL NOT add a Moto DVR STB to there system that was not rented from them.

As far as the HDD, the system will format it once it is installed.

The files will only be usable on that STB, as it is encoded with the STB and HDD seriel numbers. You will not be able to take the HDD and play it in another STB or on any PC.

They are working on the DRM code to allow external HDD to be added, but once again. the same rules will apply.

conanford

04-03-07, 12:18 AM

Just one question--is it possible to open up the dct-6400 (no internal hard disk) and add one? Does it have the necessary interface components?

hedge

04-03-07, 11:06 AM

Can anyone tell me how the hard drive jumper should be set on a phase 1 6412 with an IDE drive (Master or Cable Select?). It works now, set to cable select but the box doesn't seem that stable.

scanpa

04-07-07, 02:37 AM

Can anyone tell me how the hard drive jumper should be set on a phase 1 6412 with an IDE drive (Master or Cable Select?). It works now, set to cable select but the box doesn't seem that stable.

Different brands of HDD have different jumper settings for single HDD useage.

Some want no jumpers, some want CS, some want it set to master.

What does it say on your HDD or in the instructions for your new HDD?

Joe Q

09-08-07, 05:44 PM

Someone asked me a couple of questions.
:
:
:
:
"So basically my goal was to mirror the 120gb drive over to the 250gb drive, leaving everything the same except the size of the partition that actually contains PVR data."

Not going to happen, that I can see. Not only that, but I'm quite certain that ALi component doesn't do 48-bit LBA, meaning large disks (>137 GB) are out of the question.

Furthermore, none of the partitions on the disk are of a common filesystem -- although references are made to GPFS, which may or may not be the same GPFS invented by IBM (a high-performance filesystem for mainframe applications).

A long shot that you will spot this reply but I will try anyway since you are the first Linux person I have found who is 'mucking about' with this device trying to increase recording capacity and you obviously know what you are doing when it comes to Linux.

I have the latest generation Motorola 6416 as well as the new UI. This is for my Verizon FIOS TV that I switfched to from Directv 2 months ag
I opened the case on the 6416 and have placed the 160 Gbyte Sata disk that is from my 6416 as well as a blank 320 Gbyte SATA disk into a PC running Linux kernel 2.6. I am using the Debian distro.

The 160 Gbyte disk is 85% full of recordings and has LOTS of season passes.

I have tried all the Linux partioning tools (gparted,fdisk,fips,partimage,etc.) and they all complain about invalid partition table,whcih makes perfect sense from what your posts have said.

My first question to you is: What tools are you using that lets you see the level of detail on the disk that you have posted, such as the signature bytes?

For the sake of the following discussion, assume the naming convention of the 160 Gbyte disk from the Moto 6416 as /dev/sdb and the 320 Gbyte blank disk as /dev/sdc

I am able to do "fdisk /dev/sdb1" and "fdisk /dev/sdb2" with success.

Those are the only 2 partitions that fdisk sees.
fdisk tells me that /dev/sdb1 is ~3 Gbytes and /dev/sdb2 is ~145 Gbytes.

I did a "dd" of both partitions to files which proved interesting.

In dumping the file of /dev/sdb1 with the -c option, I can spot the text which shows the names of the shows that are recorded as well as the description of the shows that one sees on the TV.

I am making the totally unfounded assumption that the non ascii values that I see are pointers to the actual files recorded on the disk.

The dump of /dev/sdb2 has no obvious patter's in the data.Given the size of that parition and the fact that this is the second of the 2 partitions, I can make the assumption that /dev/sdb2 is where the actualy recordings are.

I have done several experiments with cloning these disks.
My first one was merely to see if I could clone to a physcially larger disk and get the 6146 to work.

First, I put /dev/sdc into the Moto 6416 and rebooted it so that it created the identical 2 empty partitions described above. The 6416 worked properly with that 320 Gbyte disk setup as a 160 Gbyte disk.
I doubled checked /dev/sdc1 and 2 back on the Linux PC.

Then using the dd command twice , I copied the two partitions from /dev/sdb to /dev/sdc.

I put the cloned 320 Gbyte disk (/dev/sdc) back into the 6416 and rebooted.
Right away I knew that the clone was successful when I hit the "DVR" button.
All my recordings were there and the season pass and other stuff were all there. Obviously, it was still a 160 Gbyte disk.

I even sat down to do a verification test (and celebrate) and of course had to have a beer while I watched a one hour recording from the DVR menu:) Flawless playback,etc.

So one can clone the disc in the 6416 and the clone works perfectly.
May not seem like a big desal to others but with such attention to detail when it comes to DRM by Motorola, I figured that the recordings would be tied to the disk's serial number or sometjng like that.

I do not have a second 6416b to try the clone in.

My next set of experiments were to see if I could build a partition table on /dev/sdc that the 6416 would be happy with and if so, see if I could make partition 2 BIGGER

All of these ended up with the same result: After reboot, the 6416 rebuilt the partition table to that wierd one and my 320 GB disk is built as a 160
This is where I have hit a brick wall .

Yesterday, I confgured and ordered a Vista Media Center PC from HP with dual ATI Cable Card tuner's. That will be connected to my 5 TB SAN.
Until it shows up, I will continue to mess with this 6416 but I am out of ideas so that is why I was pleased to stumble upon alexburke and his posts.

Thanks for reading my novel:)

Ideas and answers to my question above will be most appreciated.

Joe

HDTVonthePC

10-23-07, 04:33 PM

***BUMP***

I was just wondering if anyone has successfully added a second drive to double capacity?? So--theoretically--two 160GB drives would give a total of 320GB or more than 2.5 times the original 120GB drive space. Not to mention going to 7200 RPM drives vs. the quoted original speed of 5400 RPM.

Joe Q

10-23-07, 04:50 PM

HDTVonthePC

10-24-07, 01:46 PM

Wouldn't it be a double connection cable? (For IDE that is)

I haven't looked at it closely whether a second drive could physically fit in there or not, but I have read elsewhere that it was possible.

Joe Q

10-24-07, 03:25 PM

Wouldn't it be a double connection cable?

I haven't looked at it closely whether a second drive could physically fit in there or not, but I have read elsewhere that it was possible.

I now have a Vista Cable Card PC with a 1.5 TB Raid to use as my DVR so I turned in the QIP6416.

I did this about a month and a half ago so here is what I remember:

The SATA cable only had one connector on it and it was obvious from it's connection to the motherboard that there was only provision for one cable.

Since the cable was very short and removing the disk was going to be difficult due to not really having the correct tool, I merely placed a 250 Gbyte disk on top of the installed one.

To prevent any chance of something falling onto the Motherboad and the VERY exposed Power supply,I would then put the cover back on (without the screws)
So, there would be room for a stacked arrangement but as I said, there is no provision for a second SATA cable inside.

I am totally convinced that the ONLY way to expand this DVR is via an external Disk drive.
Supporting an external disk drive will require a firmware upgrade and I believe that this will never happen.

Being removable means that this dsk can be connected to any PC and I believe that they are afraid this will open the door to 'breaking' the copy protection that I have described.
Obviously, Motorola does not want to get themselves caught in the middle of a lawsuit.

This is pure conjecture on my part but I believe that the only way we are going to get more recording capacity from Motorola is when they come out with a new model with a larger internal disk drive.

Of course, you have other options like TIVO or a Cable Card PC.
Personally, I do not like large recurring costs so I went the PC route.

HDTVonthePC

10-24-07, 04:45 PM

I now have a Vista Cable Card PC with a 1.5 TB Raid to use as my DVR so I turned in the QIP6416.
...

Of course, you have other options like TIVO or a Cable Card PC.
Personally, I do not like large recurring costs so I went the PC route.

Obviously this becomes a whole new thread...I'd be interesed in how you got a Cable Card in a PC. Did you have to start with an OEM built one?

Joe Q

10-24-07, 04:56 PM

Yes, you do.

Here is the thread on this HP PC:
http://www.avsforum.com/avs-vb/showthread.php?t=886513

and here are two really good ones about CableCard PC's in general:
http://www.avsforum.com/avs-vb/showthread.php?t=771387

http://msmvps.com/blogs/chrisl/archive/2007/06/11/956401.aspx

Chubbynuts

05-06-08, 10:17 PM

Chubbynuts

05-06-08, 10:17 PM

Number 2

Chubbynuts

05-06-08, 10:18 PM

Number 3

Chubbynuts

05-06-08, 10:24 PM

http://replayguide.sourceforge.net/dct6412/index.html This is the link that will explain how to use the fire wire connection to remove the recorded content of the STB. Also, the STB have a fully functional Docsis modem inside that will provide high speed internet service. It is virtually the same modem that is provided for Shaw's internet service. It isn't used for reliability issues, meaning if the box breaks down, they don't want you to lose both you're internet and you're tv so it remains disabled.

Am7crew

01-25-11, 07:31 PM

there is a way to upgrade the internal hard drive to a 1TB (have one myself). I bought it from hdtvsales.ca for $100.00 but can confirm it does work, Im not sure how the guy formats the drives for them to work but I just installed mine and it works fine.
http://www.hdtvsales.ca/image.php?type=P&id=16474

TNO821

01-25-11, 09:46 PM

I'm 99.44% sure that the person who sold that 1 TB drive to you duplicated that drive from one that was originally connected to the eSATA port of a Motorola cable box.

In other words, they didn't do anything fancy to format it; They let the DCT-6412 or 6416 or DCH-3412 or 3416 handle formatting the 1 TB drive as an external drive.

*Note: Unlike the internal SATA connection, which will only ever format a hard drive to a maximum of 160 GB, the eSATA port on the back of the cable box is able to format a drive up to a maximum of 1 TB. Unfortunately, almost none of use live in an area where the cable company allows the eSATA port to operate.

Once formatted as an external drive, that drive can be used as either the internal or external hard drive. Now, most of us live in an area where the cable company doesn't allow for external drives. And in that case our only choice is to use it as the internal drive.

For people who live in an area where eSATA external drives can be used, you can actually have up to 2 TB of storage! (a 1TB internal drive and a 1 TB external drive) Also, if you live in an area that allows eSATA external drives, you can save some cash instead of buying a preformatted drive...just spend $60 on a 1 TB drive and have your cable box format it as an external drive (and then open your cable box and use it as the internal drive).

I am not aware of anywhere in the US where a cable company allows the use of eSATA external drives. I do know that Shaw cable in Canada allows the use of external drives with Motorola cable boxes.

Am7crew

01-27-11, 01:53 AM

ahh that would explain it. So the question is, is there a way I can clone this drive to another 1TB drive to use in another STB?

TNO821

01-27-11, 03:12 AM

ahh that would explain it. So the question is, is there a way I can clone this drive to another 1TB drive to use in another STB?

Yes. Any drive imaging program that can perform a sector-by-sector copy of that hard drive to another (identical) hard drive. Sometimes this is called a Raw Copy or Raw Image of the drive.

Theoretically the other drive does not need to actually be identical, but it would be a lot safer if you used the same model of hard drive. Keep in mind that 1 TB is the maximum drive size that the Motorola cable boxes can support.

I've been playing around with these drives quite a bit these past couple of days (I do not have a 1 TB drive, I've been putting drives into my DCH3416 and having it format them to 160 GB...just for messing around with the IBM GPFS file system).

You can run the Linux dd command to duplicate the disk. I'm sure that there are quite a few other ways to do it, but I don't want to steer you wrong. I'll do some more playing around and reply again later today with a step-by-step method.

Am7crew

01-27-11, 06:27 PM

great! thanks for the response, Ill try to clone it to another 1TB drive and report back how/if it works. I appreciate the guidance.

TNO821

01-27-11, 08:17 PM

I'll outline how you can use a free Linux boot CD to clone the hard drive for a Motorola cable box DVR. If any shows are on the cloned drive they will only be playable on the unit that recorded it, as the shows are locked to the DVR that recorded them due to DRM. You can simply delete any unplayable shows once you put the new drive in your other DVR.

Here are the steps:

1. Download and burn the Linux "Trinity Rescue Kit" CD ISO file from:
http://linux.softpedia.com/progDownload/Trinity-Rescue-Kit-Download-8142.html
(it's just under 150 MB and easily fits on a CD)

2. Shut down your PC and connect both the Motorola-formatted 1 TB DVR hard drive and your new blank 1 TB hard drive.
Note: You want to connect both drives using SATA; DO NOT use an external USB enclosure or it could take *FOREVER* to copy. SATA will be much much faster.

3. Insert the Trinity Rescue Kit CD and boot your computer from it.

4. At the first prompt take the default, "Run Trinity Rescue Kit 3.4 (default mode, with text menu)
http://i45.photobucket.com/albums/f100/TNO821/Linux_DD_1.jpg

5. You'll see Linux boot up.
http://i45.photobucket.com/albums/f100/TNO821/Linux_DD_2.jpg

6. At the "Trinity Rescue Kit easy menu", choose "Go to a shell" (the fifth choice from the bottom).
http://i45.photobucket.com/albums/f100/TNO821/Linux_DD_3.jpg

7. Type the following: sfdisk -l
(Note: That's an L, not an I...it stands for List)

You'll see some information listed about the disks in your system and any partitions that may be on them.
****This next part is really important**** You should see an error message from sfdisk telling you that one of your disks has an unrecognized partition table type.
For me, the error message says "sfdisk: ERROR: sector 0 does not have an msdos signature
/dev/sdb: unrecognized partition table type
No partitions found"

Be sure to write down the name of that drive! For me it is "/dev/sdb", but for you it might be "/dev/sda" or something else. Whatever the name, this is your Motorola-formatted drive. sfdisk says that it has an unrecognized partition table type because Motorola uses a very esoteric file system, IBM's GPFS (General Parallel File System). This file system is not a standard Linux file system and can't be read without purchasing a license from IBM and jumping through a bunch of hoops.

If you want to be super-careful, first boot your computer with only the Motorola-formatted 1 TB drive and use sfdisk -l to see what drive name it is assigned.
Then boot with both drives and double-check until you are comfortable that you know which is which.

Anyways, it's critical to get the name correct so that you don't accidentally overwrite the Motorola-formatted drive with the blank one (that'd be a real facepalm moment).

8. The final step is to type in the correct command to perform a sector-by-sector drive copy.
We'll use the Linux dd command...it stands for "data definition", though is often referred to as "data destroyer" b/c people too frequently screw up step 7 and overwrite their data drive with the blank drive :)

So here's how my command looked:
dd if=/dev/sdb of=/dev/sda

*Be sure that the /if switch is followed by the Motorola-formatted drive and the /of switch is followed by the blank drive.

And that's it. Now you wait for quite a few hours. I don't know how long a 1 TB drive will take to copy, but my 160 GB drive takes a few hours.
The computer I'm using is not particularly new (I built it in 2005), so yours may copy the drive faster.
It's important to note that the Trinity Rescue Kit uses power saving, so your monitor will go blank after extended inactivity. Just wiggle your mouse or tap a shift key to wake up the screen.

http://i45.photobucket.com/albums/f100/TNO821/Linux_DD_4.jpg

Unfortunately there is no progress indicator. You'll only see a blinking cursor in the lower-left corner of the screen on the line below where you typed the dd command. But eventually, once the copy has completed, you'll see a few lines of output that mention how many sectors were copied.
(And if you listen closely, you'll probably be able to hear that it's copying and your HDD LED on your computer will be going. I assure you it's not hung, you'll just need to give it time. I wouldn't be surprised if you needed to leave it running overnight.
I'm sure that there are other methods that would also work, but this one is totally free and I've tested it several times over.

http://i45.photobucket.com/albums/f100/TNO821/Linux_DD_5.jpg
You can see that, once it finishes, it mentions the number of records read and written and the amount of time the copy took. So it looks like this 160 GB clone took just under 4 hours to complete.

Am7crew

01-28-11, 11:41 PM

thanks! Before I saw this though I used DiskCopy 2.3 and booted from CD with both drives hooked up via sata, chose source drive then destination, did sector by sector. Took about 3 hours but worked like a charm!

It didnt give me any errors and had a progress bar with time remaining, amount copied, etc. A nice little free app too. I really appreciate you taking the time to post those instructions and screen shots, although I did not see them Im sure it will help someone in the future.

TNO821

01-29-11, 12:32 PM

thanks! Before I saw this though I used DiskCopy 2.3 and booted from CD with both drives hooked up via sata, chose source drive then destination, did sector by sector. Took about 3 hours but worked like a charm!
That's good to know. So we now know the free Easeus Disk Copy 2.3 works well for copying a Motorola DVR hard drive.

For the benefit of others, here's Easeus' instructions on using the tool:
How to use Easeus Disk Copy (http://www.easeus.com/disk-copy/disk-copy.htm)
And here's the download link for Easeus Disk Copy:
Download_Easeus_Disk_Copy (http://download.cnet.com/Easeus-Disk-Copy/3000-2248_4-10867157.html)
The download is a zip file that contains an .iso. Simply burn the iso to CD and use it to boot your computer.

It didnt give me any errors and had a progress bar with time remaining, amount copied, etc.
It's important to understand that the "error" described in my instructions was intentional and merely used to figure out which hard drive was the Motorola-formatted drive. Otherwise there is a serious risk that someone could get confused and accidentally overwrite the Motorola-formatted drive with the blank one, which would be a disaster.

That same risk exists with using Easeus Disk Copy, and is perhaps greater. The biggest risk is when both hard drives are the exact same model...it can be very difficult to figure out which is the blank one and which is the Motorola-formatted one (Since there are no disk copy programs that will recognize the GPFS file system, the Motorola-formatted drive will appear to also be blank). It's a lot less confusing if the two hard drives are from different companies because most disk copy software will show you the drive manufacturer name and model number.

I really appreciate you taking the time to post those instructions and screen shots, although I did not see them Im sure it will help someone in the future.
No problem. I've gotten so much good info from this site and feel the need to give a little back.

Am7crew

01-30-11, 08:51 PM

TNO821

01-31-11, 08:24 PM

Yes, and one thing to add... to be safe before you copy your hard drive always write down the number from the hard drive sticker to a piece of paper (example on SeaGates: ST31000526AS) as thats how you will choose which drive to use as source and which for destination also that way you always know the DVR one from the new one you are formatting. Always better safe then sorry!

True, but a lot of people will buy the exact same model of hard drive, so it becomes a lot more difficult to discern which one is the source and which one is the new drive (they would both show up as ST31000526AS).

dan74

02-19-11, 07:05 PM

Ill try to clone it to another 1TB drive and report back how/if it works.

So, does it work after all? I appreciate you wrote:

thanks! Before I saw this though I used DiskCopy 2.3 and booted from CD with both drives hooked up via sata, chose source drive then destination, did sector by sector. Took about 3 hours but worked like a charm!

but I guess that was just the cloning part, whereas I'm interested to find out if the cloned disk worked inside the PVR.

If it worked I can see a method by which somebody that has an eSATA-enabled Motorola DVR can help anybody else to format his/her bigger disc(s):
1. get a new (empty) bigger SATA disc (e.g. 320GB, 500GB, 640GB or 1TB)
2. connect it to a computer and fill it with zeroes (e.g. dd if=/dev/zero of=/dev/sd#)
3. connect it to the eSATA port on the Motorola DVR and let the device initialize it
4. test 1-2 minutes to see if the new disk is recognized, but do NOT record anything on it!
5. disconnect the disk from the DVR and connect it to the computer again
6. create a compressed image of the disk (e.g. dd if=/dev/sd# | gzip -c >dd_image.gz)
7. share the resulted image with the community :) (e.g. via torr ents)

Because of the steps 2 and 4 above and thanks to the compression I estimate that the image will be reasonably small to easily transfer via torr ents. Try to keep step 4 as short as possible because all the buffered data will show up in the image file, making it very large (Total buffer space taken by both tuners is 19280MB).

If several people do this with the most usual disk capacities (i.e. 320GB, 500GB, 640GB, 1TB) we may very well end up with "templates" suitable for everybody!

So... anybody up for this? I'd do it myself, but I don't have the spare disk yet (I'm not currently in the US and here disks are twice the price - that is *when* you can find them... I'd rather go and buy one after we find out if this actually works). On top of this - how do I find if the eSATA port on my DCT3412 unit is enabled? I checked d11 (interface/port status) in the diagnostics menu but eSATA is not listed at all.

LE: after all I may not need this for a while since I accidentally deleted everything from my disk by testing the HDD reset procedure and foolishly assuming that pressing "Exit" means "cancel"... Now I suddenly have 88GB free again (i.e. max. space available on a 120GB disk)

Cheers!

PS: Some very good info can be found at http://en.wikibooks.org/wiki/How_to_use_a_Motorola_DVR

TNO821

02-20-11, 09:58 PM

So, does it work after all?
...
but I guess that was just the cloning part, whereas I'm interested to find out if the cloned disk worked inside the PVR.
It worked. I took his response to mean that everything worked, not just the cloning. He stuck it in his other cable box and it works and sees the full 1 TB of space.

If it worked I can see a method by which somebody that has an eSATA-enabled Motorola DVR can help anybody else to format his/her bigger disc(s)
...
Because of the steps 2 and 4 above and thanks to the compression I estimate that the image will be reasonably small to easily transfer via torr ents.

I'm skeptical that compression will be able to reduce the image size by a lot (after all, GPFS is an unrecognized partition type), but this is worth a try.

I'll test it out with the 160 GB default hard disk size and see how much smaller things are with compression. I don't live in an area where the eSATA port works and am unwilling to buy a pre-formatted 1 TB drive, so someone else will have to help out if the compression turns out to be worthwhile.

dan74

02-22-11, 12:20 PM

I'm skeptical that compression will be able to reduce the image size by a lot (after all, GPFS is an unrecognized partition type), but this is worth a try.

If you observe steps 2 and 4 it will work, I can promise you that :) This is how:
a. In step 2 you fill the *entire* disk with zeros, regardless of any (future) partitions;
b. Steps 3 and 4 are the only ones when the DVR writes anything to the disk; if you minimize the testing duration in step 4 you'll also minimize the info written on the disk (remember, in step 3 the DVR just "formats" the disk, it does not actually fill it up, but all the buffering in step 4 is done on the disk);
c. most of the image realized in step 6 would consist of only zeroes, which gzip will compress extremely well regardless of the type of information of the disk (i.e. partitions, filesystems etc.) - dd simply does a raw "disk dump", sector by sector.

I'll test it out with the 160 GB default hard disk size and see how much smaller things are with compression. I don't live in an area where the eSATA port works and am unwilling to buy a pre-formatted 1 TB drive, so someone else will have to help out if the compression turns out to be worthwhile.

Great, please do so and report back. Don't omit step 2, it's essential even if the disk is brand new.
Warning: You need to pay extra attention to the disk letter you use (e.g. /dev/sda or /dev/sdb or /dev/sdc etc.) in steps 2 and 6.

Cheers
Dan

TNO821

02-22-11, 12:30 PM

If you observe steps 2 and 4 it will work, I can promise you that :)
...
most of the image realized in step 6 would consist of only zeroes, which gzip will compress extremely well regardless of the type of information of the disk (i.e. partitions, filesystems etc.) - dd simply does a raw "disk dump", sector by sector.
Yeah, the more I think about it, the more I like this idea and believe it will work.

Warning: You need to pay extra attention to the disk letter you use (e.g. /dev/sda or /dev/sdb or /dev/sdc etc.) in steps 2 and 6.
Yeah, I'll be mega careful about choosing the correct drive! :) Hopefully I'll find time this evening to try this.

dan74

02-22-11, 02:04 PM

Great, looking forward to hear how it went :)

In the meantime, do you have any idea how I can check if the eSATA port on my DCT3412 box is active? I checked the Diagnostics and I couldn't find anything relevant. Also - I don't have an extra empty SATA disk to test.

LE: Never mind, I found out this: http://www.motorola.com/staticfiles/Video-Solutions/_Documents/User_guides/Static_files/Motorola%20DVR%20Set-top%20External%20Storage%20User%20Guide.pdf :
"In order to use Motorola’s External DVR Storage feature, your cable service provider must authorize your account for use of this feature. If your account has not been authorized to use this feature, you will be notified by an on-screen message upon connection of an external drive to your Motorola DVR cable box."

Cheers

dan74

02-22-11, 02:40 PM

I'm 99.44% sure that the person who sold that 1 TB drive to you duplicated that drive from one that was originally connected to the eSATA port of a Motorola cable box.

You know what worries me? This:
http://www.motorola.com/staticfiles/Video-Solutions/_Documents/User_guides/Static_files/Motorola%20DVR%20Set-top%20External%20Storage%20User%20Guide.pdf
Chapter 3: "Once the formatting process is complete, the external drive can only be used with the last cable box that was used to format the external drive."

TNO821

02-22-11, 04:22 PM

You know what worries me? This:
http://www.motorola.com/staticfiles/Video-Solutions/_Documents/User_guides/Static_files/Motorola%20DVR%20Set-top%20External%20Storage%20User%20Guide.pdf
Chapter 3: "Once the formatting process is complete, the external drive can only be used with the last cable box that was used to format the external drive."
I don't believe that. Any recordings on it will only play back on the cable box that recorded it, but the drive itself is usable by other cable boxes.

I think their statement is just being overly broad. As in, if you cart this external drive (loaded with recordings) over to your friend's home, they aren't going to play back.

As for your question about e-SATA, the only way to know is to hook up the drive and see if an error appears on the screen. A firmware update removed the requirement of calling the cable company and giving them your external drive's serial number. But the cable company has to allow for the use of external drives, which very few do.

Here's what the error message looks like if your cable company doesn't allow external drives (this automatically comes up as soon as you hook the drive to the cable box):

http://i45.photobucket.com/albums/f100/TNO821/eSATA_Not_Authorized.jpg

TNO821

02-23-11, 04:22 PM

Okay, so I changed my mind on using the 160 GB drive...it has too many shows that I want to transfer via firewire or Hauppauge HD-PVR (for anything 5c'd to copy-once or copy-never).

So instead I'm using a spare 250 GB hard drive.

So far I've written zeros to the 250 GB drive using the method described above. My command line was:
dd if=/dev/zero of=/dev/sda

It took about 3 hours to fill the 250 GB drive with zeros.

Later today I will hook the 250 GB hard drive into the DCH3416 and give it just enough time to initialize and format it. As a test, I will also record about 1 minute of SD material...this will be needed for me to be sure that the whole thing wasn't unrecognized and then reformatted. (ultimately made necessary by the fact that the partition size is always the default 160 GB...I need to be able to make sure it's *my* 160 GB partition and not a new reformatted one).

I will then create the image.

TNO821

02-23-11, 08:21 PM

So far, this is awesome! The image has been created and is only 2.01 GB in size!!

I didn't use Linux for this initial test. For imaging speed reasons, I used the trial version of Active@ Disk Image (I used the LiveCD bootable disc, http://www.livecd.com/download.htm) and created a "Raw disk image" using Normal compression. It took only 1:11:17 to create. Using dd in Linux would have taken a fair bit longer.

I am now dumping that image to a spare 500 GB hard drive that I have. Hopefully it will show the 2 minute PBS recording that I made.

If this works, I'll do it again without putting a recording on and see how big the image is.

dan74

02-23-11, 08:28 PM

Sound perfectly fine to me, we're waiting your results :)
I wish I had a spare disk to check if my eSATA port is enabled.

Just one question - why do you think that using linux dd would be slower? After all the bottleneck is the disk itself. I hope your imaging program really creates a full disk bit-for-bit clone regardless of partitions, filesystems etc.

1 minute of SD material doesn't take too much space, it's probably not even significant compared to the 2GB image you created. However if you start again you may want to "clean" the disk again (fill it with zeroes) to keep the size as small as possible.

Cheers
Dan

TNO821

02-23-11, 08:47 PM

Sound perfectly fine to me, we're waiting your results :)
I wish I had a spare disk to check if my eSATA port is enabled.
Just one question - why do you think that using linux dd would be slower? After all the bottleneck is the disk itself.

I know dd is slower b/c I've used it for this purpose numerous times. It took 4 hours to dump my 160 GB DVR drive. That *exact* same image was created using Active@ Disk Image (from a WinPE boot disk) in under 2 hours.

Just look at my screenshots from earlier in this thread; I only got 11.5 MB/s using dd. I get far better throughput using Ghost, Active@ Disk Image, Easeus Disk Copy, etc. (all tested against the exact same 160 GB DVR hard drive with the same recordings on it, etc..a level playing field.)

So I'm not sure why dd is that much slower, but it is.

1 minute of SD material doesn't take too much space, it's probably not even significant compared to the 2GB image you created. However if you start again you may want to "clean" the disk again (fill it with zeroes) to keep the size as small as possible.
I will absolutely re-fill the drive with zeros first, otherwise I would not expect the size to be better than the 2.01 GB I now have. I may also consider having Active@ Disk Image use High compression instead of Normal compression, though I don't expect any improvements based on that.

I hope your imaging program really creates a full disk bit-for-bit clone regardless of partitions, filesystems etc.
It best! Otherwise they shouldn't refer to it as a "Raw" image. Actually, the 500 GB drive just finished imaging as I was typing this...and it took only 00:59:23 to load the image!

And it WORKED! I see the 2 minute SD recording of PBS! And it plays back just fine.

So now I'm going to go back to the 250 GB drive and write zeros to it again and try this procedure again without recording anything to it. Should I put the STB into standby and never actually power it up? Just let it initialize and format the drive, but just leave it in standby for a couple minutes before pulling the drive and creating the image...
Thoughts?

dan74

02-23-11, 09:41 PM

I'm glad it worked! To quote an uber-geek: "I informed you thusly!" :))

Your issue with dd speed may be related to the block size. Try playing with the bs= cmd line arg (bigger blocks=faster transfer, but the computer may not be so "snappy" during the transfer).

Remember that even if the DVR is in standby mode it still buffers 2 channels (i.e. records data to disk). So I would power it off and disconnect the disk as soon as you're sure it is correctly formatted & usable.

Now it would be really interesting to get somebody with an enabled eSATA port to do the same to check your theory that this is how they format the "extension" 1TB drives sold on eBay...

TNO821

02-23-11, 10:02 PM

Remember that even if the DVR is in standby mode it still buffers 2 channels (i.e. records data to disk).
I'm fairly certain that is incorrect. When I put my DCH3416 into standby, it does not buffer the tuners. This is quite noticeable when I have my 750 GB Seagate drive in it b/c that damn drive is one noisy mofo. All that click-click-clinckin' falls silent right-quick once in standby. That, and the fact the buffers are empty upon powerup points to a complete (or nearly complete) lack of hard drive use when in standby.

So I would power it off and disconnect the disk as soon as you're sure it is correctly formatted & usable.
Agreed, but my crystal ball is currently in the shop ;)

Now it would be really interesting to get somebody with an enabled eSATA port to do the same to check your theory that this is how they format the "extension" 1TB drives sold on eBay...
Oh, that's how they do it.
I'm certain that's how they do it. I suppose it is remotely possible that an externally formatted drive really could only be utilized by the same cable box that formatted it, but I highly, highly doubt it.

I'm not doing this to see if that's how others have managed it. It is. I know it, they know it, dogs know it. I'm doing this to see how small the image can be made. And I love your idea of making "community templates" that people could freely download to extend the recording space.

Now me myself, I've decided I don't even want the extra space. It would encourage me to be lazy about transferring shows. I don't really even use the 160 GB. I'm just dicking around with this thing b/c it's fun.

If somebody is willing to download my image and load it on their 250 GB or larger hard drive, we could see if it refuses to operate on any other cable box than the one that formatted it.

dan74

02-23-11, 10:51 PM

Oh, my bad, I don't even know why I assumed that you have exactly the same Motorola model as me (DCT3412). Mine never truly stops, whenever I turn it back on I have the last hour buffered for both channels. While it initially bothered me (the DVR stays hot 24x7 and wastes a lot of energy) I kinda got used to the convenience of being able to check the BBC news from the beginning of the news bulletin regardless of current time :)

I suppose it is remotely possible that an externally formatted drive really could only be utilized by the same cable box that formatted it, but I highly, highly doubt it.

Here's the relevant fragment from the Motorola manual but it's ambiguous:
"When you connect an external drive to your cable box, it will need to be
formatted for DVR use. An on-screen message will prompt you to begin the
formatting process. If the external drive was previously used with another
device, all existing contents on the drive will be erased. Once the
formatting process is complete, the external drive can only be used with the
last cable box that was used to format the external drive."

And I love your idea of making "community templates" that people could freely download to extend the recording space.

Glad to "hear" this, I wish I could prepare them myself. I got it the instant I read your post about the disks being formatted using the eSATA port, so you get half the credit for it :)

Now me myself, I've decided I don't even want the extra space. It would encourage me to be lazy about transferring shows. I don't really even use the 160 GB. I'm just dicking around with this thing b/c it's fun.

Funny you wrote this - I find it very true - the bigger the disk, the more likely you are to record more shows to it hoping you'll be able to "catch up".

If somebody is willing to download my image and load it on their 250 GB or larger hard drive, we could see if it refuses to operate on any other cable box than the one that formatted it.

OK then, I reckon I'll need to find a SATA disk to test your image. Could I ask you a small favor though? Could you please try making a dd+gzip image? I don't like having to use windows stuff for this kind of job. And on top of this aren't you curious to see if the dd+gzip image is smaller? :) Oh, and BTW, how to you plan to share the first "community template"? :)

Cheers,
Dan

TNO821

02-23-11, 11:29 PM

Glad to "hear" this, I wish I could prepare them myself. I got it the instant I read your post about the disks being formatted using the eSATA port, so you get half the credit for it :)
Well I can't really prepare the "real deal"...I have no way of connecting to the eSATA and formatting a 1 TB drive :(

But at least this testing can prove that we're on the right track. The genius of your idea is the method of getting compression...I pondered the idea of a template but dismissed it almost immediately b/c I assumed it would be far too huge to share over the internet. I was mistakenly assuming that the "Foreign" GPFS partition type would stymie any attempt at compression, not considering that the cable box is really just doing a "quick format" and not writing to every sector (which would take quite some time to finish, and thus would be undesirable).

Could I ask you a small favor though? Could you please try making a dd+gzip image? I don't like having to use windows stuff for this kind of job. And on top of this aren't you curious to see if the dd+gzip image is smaller? :)
Yes, I will absolutely use the dd+gzip method. I used Active@ Disk Image merely as a test, since I've seen that it gets far better throughput than what I've experienced using dd. I will also test with other imaging programs just to see where I get the best compression. But I'll do the dd+gzip method first.

Also: I'm making a change in this next test. I'm moving around some data and freeing up a 200 GB hard drive to use for this next test. This means that anybody with a 200 GB or larger SATA drive will be able to load my image and test it. I will begin writing zeros to the 200 GB hard drive within the next 5 minutes. That'll likely take about 2 1/2 hours, at which point I'll hook it to my cable box and leave the thing on standby to see how small this image can be. I will then create the image.

Oh, and BTW, how to you plan to share the first "community template"? :)
I'm not certain how I'll share the result...I've used sendspace.com in the past...they have a 300 MB size limit, so it'd need to be split into chunks (which is probably a good idea anyway). I'm certainly open to suggestions.

dan74

02-23-11, 11:41 PM

If the program you used compresses the image in individual blocks then I would expect dd+gzip to give you a better compression ratio overall.

I did a few simple tests and for example compressing 1GB of zeroes the resulting archive was roughly 970kB in size - that's a 1030:1 compression ratio. For a 250GB zeroed disk this would mean the compressed image would be roughly 250MB. I doubt the DVR writes so much info to the disk during formatting to make up the difference to the 2GB compressed image you managed to get using the windows proggie. So I think you should give linux+dd+gzip a try :)

$ dd if=/dev/zero bs=1MB count=1000 | gzip -9c | wc -c
1000+0 records in
1000+0 records out
1000000000 bytes (1.0 GB) copied, 13.442 s, 74.4 MB/s
970501

dan74

02-24-11, 12:01 AM

Well I can't really prepare the "real deal"...I have no way of connecting to the eSATA and formatting a 1 TB drive :(

I have the feeling that my eSATA port might be enabled... I'm not in the States and the local cable operator agreed to provision my own box that I bought on eBay, so I think they may not be so interested in disabling the external ports... I'll test this as soon as I find a spare SATA disk and I'll report back.

I'm not certain how I'll share the result...I've used sendspace.com in the past...they have a 300 MB size limit, so it'd need to be split into chunks (which is probably a good idea anyway). I'm certainly open to suggestions.

Like I said in my first post - I'd suggest creating torr ents. It would help a lot (both in terms of bandwidth and availability) if more than a few persons are interested in downloading the image. It could also prove more convenient to download using just my router :)

Cheers,
Dan

TNO821

02-24-11, 12:15 AM

I'd suggest creating torr ents. It would help a lot (both in terms of bandwidth and availability) if more than a few persons are interested in downloading the image. It could also prove more convenient to download using just my router :)
It's been well over a year since I've done anything involving torr ents. What would you recommend for a client? I have to imagine that my upload speed stinks, but I guess we'll find out.

dan74

02-24-11, 12:30 AM

Me too, but they're really good for distributing huge files.

I would pick a very basic one, one that may not even need to be permanently installed.
But I use the one that's built in my router so I can't help with an actual suggestion, sorry :(

However if you can get the image size down to a few hundred MB that should be also manageable by ftp.

TNO821

02-24-11, 06:03 PM

It looks like the image is going to be extremely small.

I used WinRAR to compress the Active@ Disk Image I had already created, and the 2.01 GB image compressed to less than 150 MB! And the image of the completely empty DVR drive was under a megabyte! (This was the one where I never once powered up the DVR, I just left it in standby and gave it a couple of minutes to make sure it had a chance to format the drive).

This was done using WinRAR's maximum compression...I'm guessing the dd | gzip files will be slightly larger.

My computer is currently creating the dd | gzip compressed image of the empty DVR drive. I'll upload it to SendSpace once it finishes.

TNO821

02-24-11, 08:35 PM

OK, the dd | gzip operations are done and the resulting image file is 185 MB.

This is the image of the 100% empty Motorola DCH3416 HDD. I never even powered the STB up; It was in standby before I removed the power cord and hooked the HDD to it and, after plugging in the power cord, it intialized (and presumably formatted the drive) and returned to standby. I gave it several minutes in standby to make sure it had a chance to do whatever needed to be done to the hard drive.

During the initialization, it spun up the hard drive and I heard it writing to it for maybe 5-10 seconds. After that it fell silent and I don't think it wrote to the drive again, even though I gave it another couple of minutes in standby.

Now, just for kicks, I took this 185 MB .gz file and ran it through WinRar 4.00 Beta 7 using Maximum Compression...it was able to drop the file size from 185 MB to only 181 KB!!

Here's the download link to the 181 KB WinRar compressed image
http://www.sendspace.com/file/q63cf5

When unrar'd, this will have the 185 MB .gz file which contains the image created using the Linux dd command.
You can download the Linux version of WinRar 4.00 Beta 7 from here:
http://www.rarlab.com/download.htm

I'm currently also uploading the full 185 MB .gz file and will post that link when it finishes uploading.

TNO821

02-24-11, 09:03 PM

The 185 MB .gz image is done uploading. Here's the link:
http://www.sendspace.com/file/luylw3

Later on I'll create another image that has just one short recording on it, so we can see if that is still on there when loaded on another STB (it certainly won't be playable on another STB, but I think I've read that you'll see it in the MyDVR screen).

dan74

02-24-11, 09:40 PM

Here's the download link to the 181 KB WinRar compressed image
http://www.sendspace.com/file/q63cf5

Your browser does not support JavaScript or JavaScript is disabled. You must enable JavaScript or use a JavaScript supported browser for this site to function correctly.

GRRRRRRR :(
Downloading it in a minute, but I just hate pages that NEED JavaScript to work... (hehe, I guess this has a name... "paranoia"? :)) )

dan74

02-24-11, 10:01 PM

TNO821

02-24-11, 10:42 PM

I think something's slightly off... I got the .rar file, extracted the .gz from it and:

$ gzip -lv MotoDCH.gz
method crc date time compressed uncompressed ratio uncompressed_name
defla 7c818f5a Feb 24 08:17 194146272 2481152000 92.2% MotoDCH

Wasn't the image supposed to be 200GB or 250GB?

LE: Turns out it is, gzip -lv reported it wrong:

$ gzip -dc MotoDCH.gz | wc -c
200049647616

So are you sure the disk was formatted and usable by the DVR when you created this image?

I used a 200 GB drive, but the way the companies calculate the size is a little misleading. It looks like the true size is 186 GB

But the question on whether the drive was for sure formatted and usable is a good one. I'm 90% sure it was. I may have to set up some tests to try and figure it out...maybe making videos of the STB initializing and timing it.

I think it'd be best for me to use my 750 GB Seagate for that sort of testing, as it is really really noisy compared to any other hard drive I have.

I'll wipe the seagate and play around with how long it takes before it's able to be powered on. My assumption is that it will be able to power up faster if already formatted...hopefully it takes more than a couple seconds for it to format :)

dan74

02-24-11, 10:58 PM

Now, just for kicks, I took this 185 MB .gz file and ran it through WinRar 4.00 Beta 7 using Maximum Compression...it was able to drop the file size from 185 MB to only 181 KB!!

As you said, "just for kicks" I got the same image down to 14kB using just gzip :)

$ ls -al *gz
-rwx------ 1 dan dan 194146272 Feb 24 08:17 MotoDCH.gz

$ gzip -9c MotoDCH.gz | wc -c
472713

$ gzip -9c MotoDCH.gz | gzip -9c | wc -c
16532

$ gzip -9c MotoDCH.gz | gzip -9c | gzip -9c | wc -c
14334

$ gzip -9c MotoDCH.gz | gzip -9c | gzip -9c | gzip -9c | wc -c
14357

So what have we learned from this? That compression algorithms were probably not designed for this type of input (~200GB of zeroes), but if you apply them a few times they manage in the end. As you can see it can not compress it beyond 14kB, but it still is impressive. At this size you could even uuencode it and send it via email or PM :)

TNO821

02-24-11, 11:06 PM

Holy crap! That is both ludicrous and awesome! Boosh!!

dan74

02-24-11, 11:08 PM

I used a 200 GB drive, but the way the companies calculate the size is a little misleading. It looks like the true size is 186 GB

It's the GB (gigabyte, 10^9) vs. GiB (gibibyte, 2^30), see for example http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/GiB

But the question on whether the drive was for sure formatted and usable is a good one. I'm 90% sure it was. I may have to set up some tests to try and figure it out...maybe making videos of the STB initializing and timing it.

I think it was formatted. Well, at least _something_ was written to the disk, I could see some data in the sea of zeroes. Funny, I assumed that the DVR would ask you if you want to format the drive...

dan74

02-24-11, 11:18 PM

Holy crap! That is both ludicrous and awesome! Boosh!!

Well, I guess that's the amount of data the DVR writes to the disk when it formats it. Now I just need to find a 200+GB spare SATA disk to test the image and if my eSATA port is enabled or not. Hopefully I'll be able to do this over the coming week-end. I'll post back here when I do. Thanks a lot for taking the time to do all these tests!

Cheers

TNO821

02-24-11, 11:27 PM

Well, I guess that's the amount of data the DVR writes to the disk when it formats it. Now I just need to find a 200+GB spare SATA disk to test the image and if my eSATA port is enabled or not. Hopefully I'll be able to do this over the coming week-end. I'll post back here when I do. Thanks a lot for taking the time to do all these tests!

You're welcome. And thank you for both having the awesome idea of filling the drive with zeros and helping me test.

I'll put that currently blank DVR hard drive back in the cable box and record a super short clip to it and create another image. This will be something easier to test, as I hope it'll show up in the MyDVR screen.

TNO821

02-24-11, 11:51 PM

Funny, I assumed that the DVR would ask you if you want to format the drive...

It doesn't ask anything. The front of cable box displays a blinking light and then some characters show up on the display as it initializes. Nothing appears on the TV at all until you power up the cable box, which by then has already formatted the drive.

But I have read that you'll be prompted about formatting an external drive.

Running with the assumption that your cable company allows external drives, all you'd need to do in order to prove\disprove that this overall scheme works is to get any SATA drive larger than 160 GB...any size at all, as long as it is bigger than 160 GB (well, remember that the Motos don't accept anything bigger than 1 TB). Let the eSATA format the drive and then toss it inside the DVR as the internal hard drive. If you see the full size, it worked! (use the "Power Off > Select/OK" trick to pull up the internal stats and peek at the hard drive size)

That alone would be huge...just knowing that this absolutely works.

The only other part is having somebody else (such as myself) test an image of the larger-than-160-GB DVR formatted drive and verify that it works.

So far we've managed to prove that sharing the image with the community will not be a problem...we just need to know that a drive formatted in someone else's cable box can work in others. And that's tricky when we're currently stuck at 160 GB for the partition size...whose to say that your cable box isn't going to immediately reformat the drive b/c it notices that my cable box had originally formatted it. Which is also why I want to stick a short recording on my DVR hard drive and upload another image. Hopefully it can help prove that your cable box isn't "rejecting" my image (it's type o, I swear...Type "o", not Type-o...oh forget it).

By the way, I've been using mostly laptop 2.5" hard drives during my tests. They work fine (though I wouldn't want to have both tuners recording HD at the same time...laptop hard drives aren't as spry as desktop hard drives). So if you have a laptop SATA drive larger than 160 GB, that'd be fine for a test.

TNO821

02-25-11, 08:36 PM

I've recorded a short standard-def clip to the same 200 GB hard drive that previously had 100% clean DVR partition(s).

I am now using the Linux dd | gzip combo to create the disk image and will upload the results as soon as it finishes.

I'm hoping that, once this image is loaded on another Moto cable box, the MyDVR screen will show the recording that I've made. It would not be playable of course, due to DRM, but I'm hoping it will appear in the list of recordings. The only real value here is that it would prove that my DVR hard drive image is not immediately being rejected when loaded onto another cable box. It is possible that any other cable box that loads this image would immediately decide to format the drive again (which actually wouldn't bother me, as long as it retains the same partition size).

TNO821

02-25-11, 10:31 PM

OK, I've uploaded the new Motorola STB DVR HDD image (is that enough acronyms for ya?)

This one has a very short SD recording on it, plus 2 tuners worth of caching (unless powering off auto-deletes that)

It came out to about a 250 MB .gz file which I further compressed using WinRar 4.00 Beta 7. Its final size is 58 MB. I may have been able to get gzip to get it smaller, but I'm in a big time crunch and couldn't risk any fighting with type-o's, unknowns, mistakes, etc...otherwise it would have to wait until later in the weekend, as I'm running late for lots of beer drinking.

Here's the link:
http://www.sendspace.com/file/v0uqgc

The .rar file contains a .gz file which can be used with the Linux dd command to image any SATA hard drive of at least 200 GB.

I'm hoping that, once loaded, you'd see the short recording I made from the DVR's "My Recordings" screen. I expect that it wouldn't be playable, due to DRM. But hopefully it'll show up with the very generic name that it got when I recorded it (it was something like "Fri 02/25/2011"...the name was so generic b/c the DVR had just been power-cycled and the guide data was blasted).

If anybody else wants to try testing this and isn't comfortable with Linux, just let me know (you can look earlier in this thread where I provide some directions and screenshots for downloading and using the Trinity Rescue Kit, but I can come up with more specific directions if anyone is interested).

dan74

03-01-11, 11:40 AM

So... I connected a SATA disk (full) to my DCT3412 box and I got the dreaded message saying that "the use of external drives is not authorized with your account" :( I went to my cable operator's office to ask if they would be willing to activate the SATA port and they said no :(

OTH I still don't have a spare 200+GB SATA disk to test the images. And on top of this I realized that I also don't have the reverse-something tool to open the DVR box :( So it may take a while to test the images...

TNO821

03-01-11, 11:39 PM

Well that sucks :(

The tool that you need to open the DCH3416 is sometimes known as a GameBit (this same bit is used to open old NES video game cartridges, SNES, N64, GameCube, TurboGrafx-16, etc). It is also known as a "4.5mm tool". It is an "inverted Torx" screwdriver and I've been told that you can find them at most auto part stores (though I got mine on eBay).

This link also has them:
http://www.newelectronx.com/proddetail.php?prod=BITMOTO

Bears2007

03-02-11, 11:10 PM

I have been following you guy's efforts. I have the DCT3412. I purchased a sata hd (250gb) to try the image that TNO821 has posted. I have to get my Linux working to do this.

I have a question. Does the post by Dan74 mean that a drive generated from your image file probably won't work without opening the box? Or should I just try the image to see what happens?

TNO821

03-03-11, 12:00 AM

I have been following you guy's efforts. I have the DCT3412. I purchased a sata hd (250gb) to try the image that TNO821 has posted.
I have a question. Does the post by Dan74 mean that a drive generated from your image file probably won't work without opening the box? Or should I just try the image to see what happens?
Hey ya Bears2007! Thanks for trying to help out! Yes, the only real way to test my image is to load my image on your hard drive and then open the cable box and connect your hard drive to the internal SATA connection. The problem that Dan74 is now experiencing is the 3 screws Motorola uses on the back of the cable box are very non-standard and require a special screwdriver bit.

I have to get my Linux working to do this.
Don't bother installing Linux. Just see my post here (http://www.avsforum.com/avs-vb/showpost.php?p=19907130&postcount=56) where I explain how to download the free Trinity Rescue Kit bootable CD .iso
It lets you boot into Linux and has a menu selection to "Mount all Local FileSystems", which will allow you to see my image file that you downloaded.

Dan74 discovered that, like me, his eSATA port (on the back of the cable box) is not enabled by his cable company, so we're not able to get the cable box to format a drive to anything larger than 160 GB.

Question: Have you tried hooking an external drive to the eSATA port on the back of the cable box? If your cable company allows that, it'd be a major win for us trying to create a big image to share with the community.

Bears2007

03-03-11, 10:44 AM

I have linux on a flashdrive, but it doesn't like my broadcom wifi. I just hook up a dlink dongle. I misplaced the dongle, but found it last night.

Thank you for your reply.

I plan to:

1) Download your image file
2) Copy it to the drive
3) Try to connect it to the DCT (while powered off? Then what?)

4) If this fails, I will take the lid off and try the internal connection

Does this seem ok?

TNO821

03-03-11, 03:41 PM

I have linux on a flashdrive, but it doesn't like my broadcom wifi. I just hook up a dlink dongle. I misplaced the dongle, but found it last night.

I plan to:

1) Download your image file
2) Copy it to the drive
3) Try to connect it to the DCT (while powered off? Then what?)

4) If this fails, I will take the lid off and try the internal connection

Does this seem ok?
Sorry, but there is no way to "connect" to the cable box. It won't let you. You have no choice but to open the cable box.

The steps should be:

1. Download my image file (on whatever system you want...Windows or Linux, etc...it just needs to have a CD or DVD drive)

2. Download and burn the Linux "Trinity Rescue Kit" CD ISO file from:
http://linux.softpedia.com/progDownl...load-8142.html
(it's just under 150 MB and easily fits on a CD)

3. Shut down your computer and hook your new 250 GB SATA hard drive to it (be sure to hook it to a SATA connection, not USB (too slow).

4. Insert the Trinity Rescue Kit CD and boot your computer from it.

5. At the first prompt take the default, "Run Trinity Rescue Kit 3.4 (default mode, with text menu)"

6. You'll see Linux boot up for a few moments (Note: it'll complain if the internet can't be found, but you won't need it for this, so just ignore it)...be patient and eventually you'll see a menu.

7. At the "Trinity Rescue Kit easy menu", choose the fifth option "Mount all local filesystems"

8. Once it finishes mounting your drives, you will be returned to the "Trinity Rescue Kit easy menu"...choose "Go to a shell" (the fifth choice from the bottom).

This will drop you to a command prompt where you can use the dd command to image the drive. Remember to first use the sfdisk command to verify which drive is the new 250 GB drive and which one is your computer's hard drive.

After imaging is complete, you need to shut down the computer, disconnect the 250 GB drive, and hook it into the cable box.

**You can see screen shots of using the Trinity Rescue Kit in my earlier post here (http://www.avsforum.com/avs-vb/showpost.php?p=19907130&postcount=56)
I was demoing different stuff (using the dd command to duplicate a hard drive), but it is very similar to what I just described.

dan74

03-05-11, 02:28 PM

@TNO821: I believe Bears2007 meant he/she will connect the disk drive to the DCT.

Also, any live boot CD would do, not just the "Trinity Rescue Kit". For instance I like RIP (Recovery Is Possible) Linux. You could also boot them from USB memory sticks, virtual machines etc. if you don't like burning CD (I don't).

If your PC/laptop doesn't have an eSATA port you could also use an external HDD enclosure with USB2/Firewire port(s) - this is what I use myself.

Good luck with your tests - I hope you fare better than me (i.e. have an enabled eSATA port).

Cheers

dan74

03-05-11, 02:36 PM

3) Try to connect it to the DCT (while powered off? Then what?)

Search for Motorola DVR Set-top External Storage User Guide.pdf : I found it here:
http://www.motorola.com/staticfiles/Video-Solutions/_Documents/User_guides/Static_files/Motorola%20DVR%20Set-top%20External%20Storage%20User%20Guide.pdf

There are 2 ways to connect a SATA disk drive to the DVR:
1. open the DVR box and replace the internal HDD (you will need the special tool to take out the screws; also - according to TNO821 your HDD will be instantly reformatted once you power on the DVR so you will loose all the data on in);
2. via an eSATA cable connected to the back of the DVR.

The 2nd option is really easy to test - just plug the disk cable into the port (DVR running) and in a few seconds it will display a text on the TV telling you whether the port is active or not.

Good luck!
Dan

TNO821

03-05-11, 04:03 PM

@TNO821: I believe Bears2007 meant he/she will connect the disk drive to the DCT.
The part that has me puzzled is that step 4 said removing the lid would be a last resort...I don't see how removing the DCT lid could be avoided, unless the idea is to connect to the eSATA port...

Also, any live boot CD would do, not just the "Trinity Rescue Kit". For instance I like RIP (Recovery Is Possible) Linux. You could also boot them from USB memory sticks, virtual machines etc. if you don't like burning CD (I don't).
Absolutely, but I keep mentioning the Trinity disk only b/c I have step-by-step screenshots which can assist people who may be new to Linux. For anybody familiar with Linux, use whatever LiveCD you want.

TNO821

03-05-11, 04:11 PM

Hey all, I'd like to ask everybody who'd really like to see this experiment succeed to take a moment and hook an eSATA drive to the back of your Motorola DCT or DCH cable box. (Don't open the cable box, just use the eSATA connection on the back)

I promise it won't "insta-wipe" your data! You'll get one of two on-screen messages: 1. Your account is not authorized for an external drive, or 2. Do you want to format this external drive? Yes/No

And if you don't have an eSATA enclosure, consider getting a SATA-to-eSATA adapter cable like this one at Amazon (http://www.amazon.com/Tripp-Lite-P952-003-eSATA-Signal/dp/B00119P6SU/ref=sr_1_3?ie=UTF8&qid=1299359942&sr=8-3)

If we could just find just one person who is in an area where the eSATA port is enabled, we could make this happen! You could be The One! (can I call you Neo?)

dan74

03-08-11, 07:08 PM

I guess it's just the 2 or 3 of us... kinda sad :D

TNO821

03-14-11, 05:46 PM

I guess it's just the 2 or 3 of us... kinda sad :D

Yeah...small club, eh? :)

Well, like I said in an earlier post, I don't even want 1 TB of space (it would cause me to slack off with firewire capturing). So if nobody else cares, that's fine by me.

DCTneo

03-27-11, 11:08 PM

First of all, are you guys experimenting using SATA drives or IDE?

For some background info on the drive upgrade:
www digitalhome.ca/forum/showthread.php?t=112018
Apparently WD Green 1TB drive reportedly works well and the maximum recognized size is 1TB.
Drive should be formatted externally (using eSATA port) and then installed internally, which avoids the firmware limiting larger drives to 160GB when formatted internally.

My goal is for each TV in our house (2) to have its own DVR with upgraded storage (1TB).
Have been working gradually towards this for almost a month.
We already rent a DCT6416-III ($15 monthly).
Inquired with cable provider about enabling the DVR Expander (i.e. eSATA port), but have yet to confirm if it is working.
I sourced a second unit from ebay and recently got it activated.
Looking for another DVR (preferably same model) so I can ditch the monthly rental fee.

I purchased a pair of 1TB SATA drives (WD Green 3.5" model WD10EARS) for the upgrades.
Using latest version of Western Digital DLG (Data LifeGuard) Diagnostic software,
completed Extended Test and Write Zeros to Drive for both drives.
I expect the remaining parts to arrive in the mail this week... 4.5mm security bit and appopriate drive cable (eSATA to SATA).

I have read that the drive format process does not take very long.
With the drives tested and zeroed, a drive image should compress quite well (small size).
My plan is to save an image of the newly formatted drive using either Clonezilla or g4u, as these do sector-to-sector copying and should be free to duplicate.
Original drive to be set aside at least initially. The saved image written to the second drive and installed into the DVR should prove that the plan works.
If my DVR's eSATA port cannot be activated then I will get one of the drives formatted at my brother's house (he has a DCT3416 and his provider is Shaw, which supposedly enables the eSATA ports by default). Somehow I will eventually get this to work!

Image using either Clonezilla or g4u:
- For unsupported file system, sector-to-sector copy is done by dd in Clonezilla
- One of the questions arising a lot is "what filesystems does g4u support". The answer is: "all of them". g4u reads the disk bit by bit, starting from byte #0 to the end. It includes any MBR, boot record, partition table and the partitions themselves without further investigating the structure of the data stored in these partitions.
- clonezilla uses gzip compression by default
- g4u images uploaded to the FTP server are compressed with "gzip -9". This saves as much disk space as possible, but also takes a long time - several hours are not uncommon.

TNO821

03-28-11, 01:01 AM

First of all, are you guys experimenting using SATA drives or IDE?
SATA. I've got a DCH3416, which only accepts SATA drives. I think you'd have to go all the way back to DCT6412 Phase II to have a STB that accepts IDE drives.

I have read that the drive format process does not take very long.
Correct...it's a few seconds. It's like when you perform a quick format...it's not doing very much to the drive.

Somehow I will eventually get this to work!
Awesome! You'll be my new hero! Let me know if there's anything I can do to help.

DCTneo

03-28-11, 07:32 PM

TNO821

03-28-11, 10:18 PM

Going bonkers waiting for the silly SATA cable to arrive.
It's been a few weeks wait already, probably still on the slow boat from China.
There doesn't seem to be any way to tell if the eSATA port is enabled, other than physically connecting an external drive?
I went through the following diagnostic settings but no mention anywhere of a SATA port:
# Turn off the box (press POWER on the remote).
# Immediately press OK/SELECT. Press it again if the display (black text on white background) does not come up within a second.
Correct. There is no way to know if the eSATA is going to work. Technically, I think there is a screen that will tell you if it is "enabled", but that info is nearly worthless. All that means is that it is able to detect when you hook an external drive to it. (I've never seen a Motorola cable box show this as disabled) Even if your cable company doesn't allow external drives, the drive will be detected...an error message appears on screen telling you to contact your provider. The message looks like this (http://i45.photobucket.com/albums/f100/TNO821/eSATA_Not_Authorized.jpg).

Wait a minute! Do you have a DCH or a DCT? I was under the impression that the DCT boxes don't have eSATA ports. I believe that all DCH boxes have eSATA ports. Are you sure you're not confusing another port for an eSATA port?

If your brother has a DCH3416, then he absolutely has an eSATA port. You may have no alternative than to format the drive at his home.

DCTneo

03-29-11, 12:25 AM

No the DCT6416 III definitely has an esata port on the back, right beside the firewire ports. Ebay auction 270713708547 is expired but has good enough pictures to see the port labels. I believe that earlier revisions (phase I and II) do not support it however. Phase III is definitely the one to get, as it has HDMI instead of DVI, and SATA drive instead of IDE. I have also read that supposedly the analog tuner is also improved. I know that ours has eSATA port on the back and I am looking for another unit for our other TV.

TNO821

03-29-11, 12:34 AM

DCTneo

03-29-11, 10:54 AM

Awesome! Good to know.

Just FYI, eSATA doesn't power the drive. So if you intend to hook up the WD 1TB drive via the eSATA-to-SATA cable that you mentioned, you'll also need to power the drive. Just make sure you have either an external enclosure or a PC nearby to connect the power to. (although a lot of external enclosures won't work b/c they have a custom molded data+power connector, which means you won't be able to also connect the eSATA-to-SATA cable.

Being employed as a computer / network technician, I already have these things at my disposal (just not the eSATA-to-SATA cable). I intend to use a hard drive power adapter, which goes between the wall socket and hard drive (with adaptor for SATA power).

After my drives arrived, I used a spare computer off the shelf to do the Extended Test and Write Zeroes To Drive. Each of these operations took almost 4 hours, so I estimate that's how long the drive imaging will take.

TNO821

03-30-11, 12:24 AM

Being employed as a computer / network technician, I already have these things at my disposal (just not the eSATA-to-SATA cable). I intend to use a hard drive power adapter, which goes between the wall socket and hard drive (with adaptor for SATA power).

After my drives arrived, I used a spare computer off the shelf to do the Extended Test and Write Zeroes To Drive. Each of these operations took almost 4 hours, so I estimate that's how long the drive imaging will take.

Good deal! Sounds like you've got everything you need (once the eSATA-to-SATA cable arrives). I just received a WD Green 1 TB drive that I'll use to test out the image. Assuming this whole thing works, I will also create various different image files in several formats (Acronis, Norton Ghost, etc.)...my goal is to make this as easy as possible for other people to do.

DCTneo

03-30-11, 10:25 AM

Sounds like you're as anxious as I am for my eSATA-to-SATA cable to arrive!

DCTneo

03-30-11, 08:42 PM

I just received a WD Green 1 TB drive that I'll use to test out the image.

Forgot to ask, which model number of drive? The WD10EARS drives that I have are 64MB cache, the WD10EADS have 32MB cache.

Still no cable yet, it's overdue to arrive along with a few other small ebay orders I'm expecting. Hopefully it arrives this week.

TNO821

03-30-11, 09:21 PM

Forgot to ask, which model number of drive? The WD10EARS drives that I have are 64MB cache, the WD10EADS have 32MB cache.

Still no cable yet, it's overdue to arrive along with a few other small ebay orders I'm expecting. Hopefully it arrives this week.

64MB of cache...it is the WD10EARS
I bought it from Amazon, as they had the lowest price when shipping was considered. I have apparently somehow become a permanent Amazon Prime member (only paid for 1 year, and that was several years ago), thus I always get free 2-day shipping on everything sold through Amazon (but not their partners in the Amazon Marketplace).

So the entire cost including shipping was $54.99, which seems like a great deal to me.

DCTneo

04-04-11, 04:00 PM

No SATA-to-eSATA cable in the mail yet, although the 4.5mm bit (to open the chassis) finally arrived today.

Also, I purchased another DCT6416III from ebay this weekend.
So I will now own a pair of identical PVR models outright and have the means to open them up.
I also intend to experiment with swapping a DCT hard drive into another unit to experiment whether the other DCT can access the recorded content from the drive.

DCTneo

04-07-11, 04:45 PM

SATA-to-eSATA cable finally arrived today!
So now I should have all the necessary parts.
Connected the drive to the PVR, powered up the drive, and then.... nothing.
While at home on my lunch break, I spoke with one of the customer service reps from my cable provider about getting the PVR to recognize the drive.
The rep escalated the issue but I had to get return to work before tech support was able to call me back.
Hope to experiment further this evening.
I previously called my cable provider to verify that a PVR expander (i.e. eSATA drive enclosure) could be supported.
Failing any results tonight, I will look at bringing my drive setup to my brother's house this weekend and getting my drive formatted using his PVR.

TNO821

04-07-11, 08:08 PM

SATA-to-eSATA cable finally arrived today!
So now I should have all the necessary parts.
Connected the drive to the PVR, powered up the drive, and then.... nothing.
That's not cool. It didn't even display the "not supported" message?

Have you tested with any other eSATA interface? Lots of laptops have eSATA ports on them...you'll want to do this to verify that there is nothing wrong with the adapter cable.

I previously called my cable provider to verify that a PVR expander (i.e. eSATA drive enclosure) could be supported.
The problem is that very few reps will have any real knowledge of how the eSATA (or the FireWire capturing stuff) works. And I really doubt that they know specifically which models of cable boxes support eSATA, etc.

Failing any results tonight, I will look at bringing my drive setup to my brother's house this weekend and getting my drive formatted using his PVR.
That sounds like the best bet.

DCTneo

04-07-11, 11:21 PM

Confirmed by the cable provider's customer support tonight. Because I'm not in one of their major service areas the eSATA port on my receiver cannot be activated. Oh well at least I've got all the parts now. Hope to visit with my brother this weekend, and get one of my drives formatted by his DCT3416. While I bring all the necessary bits I'll offer to help upgrade his drive also, so long as he provides a spare WD10EARS drive with which to do the upgrade.

DCTneo

04-10-11, 02:16 AM

I got 2 WD10EARS drives formatted using my brother's PVR! The format didn't take long and worked as expected. I did learn that the PVR will not format all drives externally however. My brother bought a new Seagate 1TB desktop drive to upgrade his PVR, reasoning that it would be faster than the WD green drives. True enough, but fast enough for PVR usage but with lower drive temps and less power usage.

When we connected the 1TB Seagate desktop drive it prompted to be formatted (OK) but afterwards there was a message about the drive being either incompatible or not supported, can't remember exactly which. Both my WD10EARS drives worked OK though. I expect to dump the drive image to a file some time on Monday using either g4u or clonezilla. Send me a PM where I can email the resulting drive image to.

DCTneo

04-12-11, 11:19 PM

Got my second PVR activated tonight, and got my first PVR drive upgraded. Drive info still says 160G (incorrect) but also correctly references the model of the new hard drive (WD10EARS). The real good stuff however lists as follows:

DVR / Hard Drive Status
Record Capacity Remaining
978491277312 B

The 1TB drive seems to be fully recognized! In the next few weeks I'll swap the old hard drive into the other DVR to find if it will read the contents of its peer's hard drive. After that, I'll be upgrading the hard drive on my second DVR also (and returning the rental, thus saving us the monthly surcharge).

TNO821

04-13-11, 02:02 AM

Got my second PVR activated tonight, and got my first PVR drive upgraded. Drive info still says 160G (incorrect) but also correctly references the model of the new hard drive (WD10EARS). The real good stuff however lists as follows:

DVR / Hard Drive Status
Record Capacity Remaining
978491277312 B
That. Is. AWESOME!!!!!!!
You, sir, rock!

Finally! After quite some time, this whole thing pays off. And I have to be stuck on a business trip when the case is cracked! As soon as I get home on Friday, I am going to be messing around with this and trying to simplify some kind of community template.

Thank you so much, DCTneo, for making this possible! And thanks to dan74 for the breakthrough with the zeroing-out of the hard drive for compression purposes!

DCTneo

04-13-11, 11:34 PM

So far 3 hours HD programming recorded and the PVR reports 2% space used. 1TB drive should allow to save an estimated 120 hours of HD video. Double that for a second PVR (also with dual tuners) and that's a lot of TV watching!

DCTneo

04-14-11, 11:59 PM

Tonight I swapped one hard drive into the other PVR just to experiment. PVR1 could read PVR2's hard drive contents, but not could not play any of the saved programming or video (the video showed up only as a black screen with no sound). That confirmation concludes my experimentation, so I upgraded the drive in my second PVR and set the PVR aside. For the next week or so I'll try and watch the saved content on the rental PVR before returning it and replacing it with the second PVR. I can now consider this project successful and almost complete! Done deal.

Another thing worth mentioning is about the "4.5mm nintendo security bit" I got from ebay to open the PVR chassis. I figured I'd get a cheap one from ebay since I couldn't expect to use this tool more than a few times. The cheap bits listed on ebay (most of them) aren't that great and I would next time opt for a better quality one for a couple of bucks more. The one sold by "video-game-museum" on ebay seem to be better quality and probably worth the extra cost. Even though I had the bit on hand to open my brother's PVR and my second PVR, it kept hopping off the 3 security screws on the back of the PVR. For my second PVR I reverted to my previous tool that had more leverage (a small pincer pliers) and seemed to work a bit better so long as one is careful and patient. I masked off around the screws with painter's tape so as not to scratch the surrounding areas while removing the security screws. After removing the security screws I replaced them with regular computer screws instead (CD drive mounting screws I believe have the same threads but can be rotated with a regular philips bit).

TNO821

04-15-11, 06:15 PM

Okay, this has been a fun ride and we're just about at the last stop! I just arrived home from a business trip and will be popping the 1 TB drive into my Motorola DCH3416 shortly. I will then be creating images that I will post here for everybody else to use.

I want to find the easiest free method possible for everybody else to consume this image...I'm looking at free imaging apps such as ODIN, XXCLONE and Macrium Reflect...though it appears that XXCLONE and Macrium Reflect can not handle Raw Imaging (they only appear to work with common filesystems such as FAT, NTFS, EXT)

I'd like to avoid any need for command-line knowledge, be it Linux or Windows.

I also intend to create images using the more popular commercial products such as Norton Ghost, Symantec Ghost (corporate edition), Acronis, etc.

Suggestions/requests would be appreciated!

1992lee

04-15-11, 09:04 PM

TN,
Thank you for working on this project. I have been following this thread for some time. I can't wait until you are able to post that image. Thanks again.

DCTneo

04-16-11, 03:19 PM

Just a quick update, so far I have 7 hours of HD programming (and 30-minutes of non-HD) saved on my PVR and it is reporting 4% storage used. So the initial estimate of 120 hours HD capacity could be about right or possibly rated even a bit conservatively.

For those that may be waiting for a 1TB drive image for a Motorola PVR, I created 2 images from my formatted WD10EARS drive in clonezilla and g4u formats which have been sent to TNO821 for further experimentation. After zeroing the hard drive and formatting with my brother's Motorola DCT, the resulting clonezilla image was 10MB and the g4u image was about 1.5MB.

Just a quick update from my last post about swapping hard drives between PVRs, I didn't have the sound connected so one PVR with a different PVR's hard drive installed there could indeed be sound but the saved video just played back as a black screen.

qz3fwd

04-16-11, 04:31 PM

TNO821

04-16-11, 08:59 PM

Please try recording past the capacity of the originally installed drive to make sure there is not a problem which is masked by the free space indicator giving a false positive.
That's a good point. I'll set it up to just record non-stop until it exceeds the capacity of the 160 GB partition.

Thus far my imaging tests have shown that the freely available tools leave a lot to be desired in terms of Raw Imaging. XXCLONE and Macrium Reflect do not support Raw Imaging (sector-by-sector copying) at all, and ODIN ends up crapping out with an error message just 16 minutes in (it also displays an error upon launching the app, but it lets you click past it...it seems clear that it is very unhappy about not seeing any type of partition that it can understand). I've also just tried the free Easeus Todo Backup Home, and it does not allow for backing up or restoring unrecognized partition types either.

Of course, the Linux dd command can be used, but that's going to be beyond many people's comfort level.

TNO821

04-17-11, 01:30 AM

I just got back from Frys Electronics with yet another WD10EARS 1 TB hard drive. I noticed an ad that said that Frys will price-match any retailer, including internet...so I printed out the Amazon.com page for the WD10EARS ($54.99 with free Super Saver shipping) and brought it in. They griped a little that they were losing money on the deal (which I totally believe), but they still honored it.

Just thought I'd pass that along for any of you lucky enough to live near a Frys.

Okay, so back to imaging the cable box 1 TB DVR hard drive. I should have something ready to post by tomorrow (Sunday) afternoon.

TNO821

04-17-11, 03:42 PM

Okay, here's the first easily consumable image file. This will be most easily performed on Windows systems. The image file is compressed using WinRAR 4.0. It is an Active@ Disk Image that is just over 7.6 GB in size, once uncompressed.

I am providing two copies of the image file; one is the 711 KB .rar file and the other is a 807 KB self-extracting .exe file.

It is easiest to download and use the 807 KB .exe file, because then you don't have to worry about installing WinRAR 4.0 or other similar decompression software. I am providing the .rar file for those who don't trust me or are generally paranoid that a virus could be in the .exe file (there are no viruses or any malware in the .exe file, I assure you).

You will need to use Active@ Disk Image to restore the 7.6 GB image to your 1 TB hard drive. You can download a free trial from here (http://www.disk-image.net/download.htm). Through my testing I've found Active@ Disk Image to be far better than the other disk imaging software. Its combination of ease-of-use and Raw Imaging capabilities far exceeds anything else I've tried. The free imaging software that I've tried on Windows has been unable to deal with Raw Imaging, something that is required in this situation due to Motorola's use of a customized IBM GPFS file system. There are freely available Linux imaging utilities available, but they leave a lot to be desired in the ease-of-use department (many require knowledge of the Linux command-line). I will be providing other images, including ones that can be used with free Linux imaging utilities, but those'll come a bit later.

So here are the steps:

1. Acquire a 1 TB hard drive. I recommend either the WD10EARS, the WD10EADS, or the WD10EVDS, but pretty much any 1 TB should get the job done (though you will not enjoy it if your 1 TB drive is really noisy). I'm currently using the WD10EVDS and it is amazingly quiet and is designed for use in video set top boxes.

2. Download and install Active@ Disk Image from http://www.disk-image.net/download.htm. The image was created using Active@ Disk Image 4.2.4, so you'll want to use that version or newer.

3. Download the compressed image of the 1 TB Motorola DVR hard drive from here (http://www.sendspace.com/file/1x7m1u).
(If you're not comfortable downloading it as a self-extracting .exe file, you can download the .rar file from here (http://www.sendspace.com/file/5sgwoz))

4. Extract the image file to your computer. You'll need about 8 GB of free space on the drive that you uncompress the image file to. The image consists of four files that extract to a folder named Moto1TB (Moto1TB.dim, Moto1TB.dim.001, Moto1TB.log. and Moto1TB.xml).

5. Connect your 1 TB hard drive to your computer using either SATA or eSATA (I would avoid using USB because it will be a lot slower than SATA or eSATA...imaging using USB could take many many hours).

6. Launch Active@ Disk Image and have it restore the image to your 1 TB hard drive.

7. Remove the power plug from the back of your Motorola cable box, open the cable box and replace the 160 GB (or 120 GB) hard drive with your 1 TB hard drive.

8. Plug the power cable back into your cable box and enjoy having a ton of free space!

qz3fwd

04-17-11, 04:26 PM

That's a good point. I'll set it up to just record non-stop until it exceeds the capacity of the 160 GB partition.

Thus far my imaging tests have shown that the freely available tools leave a lot to be desired in terms of Raw Imaging. XXCLONE and Macrium Reflect do not support Raw Imaging (sector-by-sector copying) at all, and ODIN ends up crapping out with an error message just 16 minutes in (it also displays an error upon launching the app, but it lets you click past it...it seems clear that it is very unhappy about not seeing any type of partition that it can understand). I've also just tried the free Easeus Todo Backup Home, and it does not allow for backing up or restoring unrecognized partition types either.

Of course, the Linux dd command can be used, but that's going to be beyond many people's comfort level.
Have you been able to get any tool to recognize the format of the drive?
I assume it is some undocumented filesystem, but probably based on ext3/xfs (encrypted) and modified such that no tools would recognize the filesystem.

Have you tried something like R-Studio?

TNO821

04-17-11, 05:26 PM

I assume it is some undocumented filesystem, but probably based on ext3/xfs (encrypted) and modified such that no tools would recognize the filesystem.
It is not undocumented, but there is not a lot of info out there. The file system is IBM's GPFS (General Parallel File System). It is most commonly used in supercomputing/clustering. It appears to have been designed from the ground up by IBM, and is not at all related to any Linux file system. It can be used on AIX, Linux, and Windows Server. Wikipedia info on IBM GPFS can be found here (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IBM_General_Parallel_File_System).

It's strengths include the ability to store large amounts of data across numerous physical drives and the ability to concurrently read from while also writing to the same file. It is well suited for high definition file streaming and recording. Now, I think it is clear that this file system is overkill for the needs of any cable TV set top box DVR, and I suspect that its esoteric nature makes it very attractive in terms of pleasing Hollywood. I have not found even one utility that is able to read IBM GPFS! That has got to make the studios happy. I assume it is a fairly big selling point and the leading reason that Motorola decided to use it.

Also: it is my understanding that Motorola has somewhat modified the IBM GPFS partition. Somebody who claims insider knowledge has stated that they use a non-standard GUID, instead of using the official IBM GPFS partition GUID which is {37AFFC90-EF7D-4E96-91C3-2D7AE055B174}. (the GUID is an identifier that would be seen at the beginning of the partition...it tells the OS what the filesystem is. A list of GUIDs for all the different file systems can be found here (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/GUID_Partition_Table).

While I haven't bothered trying, I suspect that it may not be too difficult to determine what Motorola altered the GUID to. You could take two different DVR hard drives and examine the beginning of the drive with a hex editor. Although, that area includes a CRC...changing the GUID to the normal IBM GPFS GUID may cause an error if the cable box firmware is programmed to check the CRC.

Have you been able to get any tool to recognize the format of the drive?
No, I haven't.

I have been unable to find a IBM GPFS driver for either Linux or Windows (I found some stuff for Windows Server 2003, but they were merely updates which require a pre-existing licensed full install in order to work...I've considered trying to hack it, but haven't found the time and, frankly it is very likely that there are required binaries/registry that are not present in the updates and would only be obtainable by having the full licensed driver install).

Have you tried something like R-Studio?
I have not tried, nor have I heard of, R-Studio.

TNO821

04-17-11, 07:36 PM

Drive info still says 160G (incorrect) but also correctly references the model of the new hard drive (WD10EARS). The real good stuff however lists as follows:

DVR / Hard Drive Status
Record Capacity Remaining
978491277312 B

The 1TB drive seems to be fully recognized!
I'm not getting that result...My DCH3416 is correctly showing 1000 GB rather than the 160 GB that you apparently are seeing.

Here's what I see from the Diagnostics Menu (which can be accessed by putting the cable box into Standby and then immediately pressing the "OK/Select" button on the remote):

http://i45.photobucket.com/albums/f100/TNO821/Moto_DVR_1.jpg

When I select d13, I see:
http://i45.photobucket.com/albums/f100/TNO821/Moto_DVR_4.jpg

Scrolling down reveals that the DCH3416 recognizes all 1000 GB:
http://i45.photobucket.com/albums/f100/TNO821/Moto_DVR_2.jpg

Scrolling down again reveals that there is no second hard drive (this would be the eSATA external drive, which no cable company in the U.S.A. allows on any Motorola DCT or DCH cable box):
http://i45.photobucket.com/albums/f100/TNO821/Moto_DVR_3.jpg

I'm continuing to record as much HD stuff (on both tuners at the same time) in order to fill up the 1 TB of space as quickly as possible. It's slow going, but I've finally got it up to 8% full.

At this point I have no doubt that it is working just fine, but as soon as it has more HD material on it than could possibly fit on a 160 GB partition, I'll be sure to post an update.

***************Update #1***************
I am now at 9% capacity with 841 minutes of HD material on my DVR (mostly from premium channels, which tend to get more bit rate than others). That's more than 14 hours of HD material and I haven't even hit 10%. This suggests that it might hold somewhere around 150 hours of HD, but that all depends on the bitrate of the material.

TNO821

04-18-11, 09:14 PM

Okay, I'm now at 26% full on my DVR, well beyond the capacity of a 160 GB partition.

The diagnostics screen shows:
Record Capacity Remaining
IDE0 732266758144 B

System 379904 B
GPFS 5744640 B
DVR Content 249233240064 B
DVR Index 174106624 B

To recap, here's how you can get to the Diagnostics screen:
1. using the remote, press the Power button to put the cable box into standby.

2. And then, within one second or so, you must press the "OK/Select" button on the remote.

If this is timed properly you will see the following white screen appear on your TV:
http://i45.photobucket.com/albums/f100/TNO821/Moto_DVR_B1.jpg

Pressing the down button until you reach d13 and then pressing the OK/Select button reveals:
http://i45.photobucket.com/albums/f100/TNO821/Moto_DVR_B2.jpg

Pressing the down button reveals the amount of disk space being used by the the DVR index and, most importantly, the DVR recordings. If you do the math, you can see that there is well over 200 GB of recordings on it:
http://i45.photobucket.com/albums/f100/TNO821/Moto_DRV_B3.jpg

Pressing the down button again shows that there is no second hard drive attached (this would be the eSATA external drive, which Comcast does not allow for any Motorola DCT or DCH cable box):
http://i45.photobucket.com/albums/f100/TNO821/Moto_DVR_B4.jpg

To exit the menu, you can press the left button to get back to the main menu (the first screenshot) and then press down and select the Exit option.

TNO821

04-18-11, 09:58 PM

Okay y'all, here's a 682 KB image created using a combination of Linux dd and bzip2: Moto_1TB.img.bz2 (http://www.sendspace.com/file/kcxkry)

You'll need to use Linux to restore this image. If you are a Windows user, it will be easier to deal with the image that I uploaded here (http://www.avsforum.com/avs-vb/showpost.php?p=20317824&postcount=132) yesterday.

Use the following command (or similar) to restore the image to your 1 TB hard drive:
bzip2 -d -c -f -vv /sdb1/Moto_1TB.img.bz2 | dd of=/dev/sda

(of course, the sdb1 and sda drive/partition names could be quite different in your case. Use the fdisk -l command to determine which drive is your blank 1 TB drive and which one contains the 682 KB compressed image file).

A small explanation of the command line options: bzip2 is the excellent compression utility that allows the 1 TB image to be compressed all the way down to 682 KB (thanks to dan74 (http://www.avsforum.com/avs-vb/member.php?u=8243387)'s great idea of zero-filling the hard drive first). The "-d" command option forces bzip2 to decompress, the "-c" command option forces standard output, the "-f" command option forces bzip2 to overwrite (this shouldn't matter in this case), and the "-vv" command option forces bzip2 to be very verbose (it'll display an on-screen message every second or so, which can help prove to you that it hasn't vapor-locked your PC)

I'll try to post a screenshot tutorial later today that gives more of a step-by-step.
**********update********
I'm still going to post screenshots, but those'll have to wait. I'm looking into other, easier ways to restore the image.
**********update********

One of the cool things about doing this on Linux is that, unlike with the Windows imaging utilities, dd (when used in combination with the bz2cat capability of bzip2) can read the image from the compressed file; there's no need to unzip it first. In the Windows Active@ Disk Image, you first must unzip the 711 KB .rar file which eats up about 8 GB of hard drive space! I think it's very cool that this can be avoided on Linux. (This isn't to say that Windows imaging utilities could not be made to do the same, just that I haven't found any that can...Windows utils tend to focus a lot more on the User Interface and far less on command-line support than Linux utils).

Regardless of whether you are primarily a Windows user or Linux user, you can use either the Windows or Linux images that I've posted; just download one of the many LiveCD's (I like the Trinity Rescue Kit, but if you are aware of a much better Linux LiveCD, please chime in) or, for Windows, download the trial version of the bootable Active@ Disk Image LiveCD from here (http://software.lsoft.net/BootDiskDemo-Setup.exe).

Huge props to DCTneo (http://www.avsforum.com/avs-vb/member.php?u=8329782) for being The One who provided us with the image of the externally-formatted 1 TB hard drive!!

chs4000

04-19-11, 05:31 PM

Think I could try this on a 1.5TB Seagate hard drive? I'm aware that 0.5TB of the capacity wouldn't be used and I'm fine with that. Just trying to see how much of a struggle I should go through to find an actual 1.0TB HDD. I do have one, a Western Digital Caviar Black, but would rather leave it installed in its present system than clone it over to the 1.5TB to liberate the 1.0TB.

TNO821

04-19-11, 05:44 PM

Thank I could try this on a 1.5TB Seagate hard drive? I'm aware that 0.5TB of the capacity wouldn't be used and I'm fine with that. Just trying to see how much of a struggle I should go through to find an actual 1.0TB HDD. I do have one, a Western Digital Caviar Black, but would rather leave it installed in its present system than clone it over to the 1.5TB to liberate the 1.0TB.
My guess is yes. I would be surprised if it didn't work.

I've read that the Motorola cable boxes can not deal with hard drives larger than 1.0 TB, but I assume that means that it is unable to format drives larger than 1 TB. I see no reason why a 1.5 TB or even 2.0 TB hard drive couldn't be set up with a 1.0 TB GPFS partition (I would expect problems with the newer 3.0 TB drives, though).

But this is all speculation. I suppose that it is possible that the Motorola firmware freaks out during boot-up if the drive is larger than 1 TB. I really can't test this, as the only larger-than-1-TB hard drives that I have are all sealed in USB enclosures (and being used).

chs4000

04-19-11, 06:00 PM

My guess is yes. I would be surprised if it didn't work.

Makes sense to me, too, that it should work. I'll attempt to find out in a timely manner and report back my results. Could be a day or two.

Thank you for your time. :-)

TNO821

04-19-11, 07:35 PM

Makes sense to me, too, that it should work. I'll attempt to find out in a timely manner and report back my results. Could be a day or two.

Thank you for your time. :-)
Awesome! It'll be interesting to see if this works.

chs4000

04-21-11, 12:13 PM

1.5TB hard drive formatted successfully using the 1TB image. Putting it in later today. The only thing unusual I should need is a 4.5mm inverted torx screwdriver, right?

TNO821

04-21-11, 02:48 PM

1.5TB hard drive formatted successfully using the 1TB image. Putting it in later today. The only thing unusual I should need is a 4.5mm inverted torx screwdriver, right?
That's right. And, if you're good with needle-nose pliers, you won't even need the 4.5mm inverted torx screwdriver. (DCTneo ended up using pliers, as the 4.5mm tool he purchases was of low quality and was slipping). I've also been told that most auto part stores carry the tool (but I've never checked). The tool sometimes goes by the name 4.5mm Gamebit screwdriver or 4.5mm Nintendo screwdriver. You can buy the tool here (http://www.newelectronx.com/proddetail.php?prod=BITMOTO) and also on eBay (though some are very cheap and wear out almost immediately, you may want to stick to that first website that has a good rep for QC). Be sure to select the 4.5mm size when ordering!

In addition to the odd screws, there is a plastic security clip that you will have to cut in order to pull off the lid. This is how the cable company can figure out that you've opened the box. Here's some useful links:

A really good guide to opening a Motorola DCT or DCH 6412\6416\3412\3416 cable box can be found here (http://www.instructables.com/id/Mod-your-Motorola-PVR-DVR-with-a-bigger-harddriv/).

*ignore some of the comments to the article. This was written quite a while ago, when the only known hard drive upgrade was switching out a 80 GB or 120 GB drive in favor of a 160 GB drive. The real good stuff are the tips about getting past the special security screws. They recommend using a Dremel (rotary tool) with a grinding bit to cut a straight line across the security screws and then use a regular flathead screwdriver to remove them*

****Important**** If you rent your cable box, you will eventually need to replace those security screws (so that your cable company doesn't know that you were inside of the cable box), but you can easily order them from here (http://www.newelectronx.com/proddetail.php?prod=security-screw-8). If your cable company discovers that you've opened the box, you may be charged a hefty fee.

*I think it would be a better idea to try and find a 4.5mm inverted torx socket first and properly remove the original screws...maybe print a picture of the screws or use your smart phone or digital camera to take a picture and ask around at auto-part stores.

My recommendation on the screws is to carefully remove the originals and put them in a plastic zip lock (I actually didn't bother with a zip lock bag, I just used clear packing tape and made a makeshift pouch and then stuck it to the side of my cable box lid as seen here:
http://i45.photobucket.com/albums/f100/TNO821/Cable_box_screws.jpg
I'm just using regular PC screws in place of the security screws now...I'll swap those out with the security screws before bringing the cable box back to the cable company.

Before eventually returning your cable box to your cable company, you will also need to replace the plastic anti-tamper tab that you must break in order to open the cable box. These can be purchased here (http://www.newelectronx.com/proddetail.php?prod=SPLUG) from the same website that sells the screws and 4.5mm inverted torx socket.
*unfortunately they only sell a minimum of 5...at $5 each, so it's $25 + shipping :(

If anybody knows of other places to purchase these items, please share.

chs4000

04-21-11, 04:11 PM

Thank you for all your help!

Hard drive installed, had to leave my home within a couple minutes of turning it on, though. I was able to turn on the DVR and watch Cable TV, but the DVR is in a state of flux while it gets all the programming, updates its time, etc. I wasn't able to arrange any recording before I left. When I return this evening, however, it should have had plenty of time to get situated. At that point, how should I go about verifying that I have 1TB of recording space instead of 160GB? I will of course try the obvious route of filling it up with abandon. :cool:

TNO821

04-21-11, 08:47 PM

Thank you for all your help!
You're welcome. Thanks for helping to prove (or disprove) that a 1.5 TB drive can be successfully loaded with the 1.0 TB image!

Hard drive installed, had to leave my home within a couple minutes of turning it on, though. I was able to turn on the DVR and watch Cable TV, but the DVR is in a state of flux while it gets all the programming, updates its time, etc.
Yes, that can take anywhere from a few minutes up to a few hours before it's really ready to let you create and playback DVR recordings. It seems that Motorola designed it so that all of the Guide data is stored only in memory...it doesn't cache it on the hard drive. The drawback is that any sort of power outage causes it to lose that info and it takes quite a while to pull the information from the cable signal. I wish that they'd change it to periodically cache the guide data on the hard drive so that brown-outs aren't so disruptive (a lot of people put their cable box on an Uninterruptible Power Supply in order to prevent this problem). I've found that it sometimes takes several days for my cable box to build up its entire 2-weeks worth of guide data!

I wasn't able to arrange any recording before I left. When I return this evening, however, it should have had plenty of time to get situated. At that point, how should I go about verifying that I have 1TB of recording space instead of 160GB? I will of course try the obvious route of filling it up with abandon. :cool:
The best way to know if it is really using the new larger GPFS partition is to check the Diagnostics menu.

Here are the steps for getting into the Diagnostics menu. Start out with your cable box powered on, as seen here:
http://i45.photobucket.com/albums/f100/TNO821/DVR_Getting_to_Diagnostics_A.jpg
My cable box is a Motorola DCH3416. If you have a different model your front display may look a bit different. Here in this picture I have it tuned to one of the HBO HD channels. That big white unreadable blob in the upper-right says "1080i".

1. The first step is to use the remote control to power off the cable box (or you could use the power button on the front of the cable box). The display on the front of your cable box should now show that it is in Standby mode, as seen here:
http://i45.photobucket.com/albums/f100/TNO821/DVR_Getting_to_Diagnostics_B.jpg
That big white blob in the lower-left of the display would say "Standby" if I had a decent digital camera.

2. within one second of putting the cable box into Standby mode, you must press the "OK/Select" button on the remote control (or on the front of the cable box).

If done properly, the front display on your cable box will display "d01", as seen here:
http://i45.photobucket.com/albums/f100/TNO821/DVR_Getting_to_Diagnostics_C.jpg
The white blob in the lower-left of the display still says "Standby"

Within about five seconds, your TV will display a white Diagnostics menu. Here's what it looks like:
http://i45.photobucket.com/albums/f100/TNO821/Moto_DVR_1.jpg

3. Now you need to use the remote control arrow keys and select option d13 to see the hard drive status (you can also use the Channel up and down buttons on the front of your cable box).

Once you've selected d13, you'll see the total number of bytes of available recording space, as seen here:
http://i45.photobucket.com/albums/f100/TNO821/Moto_DVR_C2.jpg

So I currently have 498,996,346,880 bytes remaining on my 1 TB hard drive.
According to math, that is 487,301,120 KB (there are 1024 Bytes in a KiloByte). Dividing it by 1024 again reveals that we have 475,880 MB. And dividing it by 1024 one last time reveals that I have 464.725 GB of free space remaining on my DVR hard drive.

*You could just divide that first number by 1073741824 and arrive at the number of GB, but I find it a lot easier to just divide it by 1024 three times in a row.

pressing the down arrow reveals more specific information about the 1 TB hard drive, where you will see proof-positive that it either is or is not using the full 1.0 TB partition size:
http://i45.photobucket.com/albums/f100/TNO821/Moto_DVR_C3.jpg
Here you can see that the total size is 1000 GB. It also reveals that my DVR is currently using 482,503,651,328 Bytes. That works out to 449.37 GB worth of DVR recordings.

These numbers and pictures happen to coincide with my DVR reaching 50% capacity, as seen here:
http://i45.photobucket.com/albums/f100/TNO821/Moto_DVR_C1.jpg
Hooker's a good cop! You best be beamin' him up, Scotty!

1992lee

04-21-11, 11:13 PM

TNO821

04-21-11, 11:38 PM

TNO821, Do you think it would be possible to run a sata to
Esata cable from the cable box to an AC powered external
hard drive enclosure so that we could easily change discs when
the capacity runs low
Yes, I see no reason why not.

I have read that the Motorola cable boxes do not allow for hot-swapping the hard drive, so it'd probably reset the cable box, which would lose your guide data (which would suck). But it's typically ready to begin recording in about 10-15 minutes after power-cycling.

Also: I'm not sure I believe that hot-swapping the drive would cause it to totally freak out...there's at least a small chance that it could recover without shitting its pants.

At some point, in the next week or so, I intend to play with that.

1992lee

04-21-11, 11:58 PM

Yes, I see no reason why not.

I have read that the Motorola cable boxes do not allow for hot-swapping the hard drive, so it'd probably reset the cable box, which would lose your guide data (which would suck). But it's typically ready to begin recording in about 10-15 minutes after power-cycling.

Also: I'm not sure I believe that hot-swapping the drive would cause it to totally freak out...there's at least a small chance that it could recover without shitting its pants.

At some point, in the next week or so, I intend to play with that.

I am looking forward to hearing the results. Thanks again for everything!!

chs4000

04-22-11, 11:42 AM

chs4000

04-22-11, 11:53 AM

I have noticed a positive change in performance with the new hard drive. It's an older 7200rpm Seagate 1.5TB drive (the first 1.5TB ever & notoriously unreliable, btw). Since it's only formatted to 1TB, it's essentially short-stroked. So basically we have a relatively high performance drive boosted even further by short-stroking (only using the outer 2/3 of the platters, which is the fastest area). I notice that forwarding is smoother now, and the 30 second skip feature is more seamless. Just thought I'd share.

TNO821

04-22-11, 12:20 PM

After swapping in the 1TB formatted drive, it indeed shows up as a 1TB drive in the diagnostics screen, it calls it "1000GB", but shows remaining recording capacity of about 40GB, 75% full, after recording with both tuners (HD content) all evening & overnight. It's acting as if it's a 160GB drive in that respect. I don't know what to do next, perhaps just keep filling it up and see what happens at 100%. It'll probably just start deleting older recordings to keep it at 160GB, even though it shows in the diagnostics screen that it is aware it has a 1000GB formatted drive to work. Think I did something wrong?

It sounds like your cable box rejected the image and reformatted to 160 GB, which is odd b/c it reportedly can't work with drives larger than 1 TB...
Maybe what it can't handle is formatting external drives larger than 1 TB.

Perhaps the largest it will look at is 1000GB, but that doesn't necessarily mean that all of that space is formatted for its use.

Which image did you load, and how did you go about it?
And also, can you post the Diagnostics menu numbers for total remaining bytes, and the bytes used by the System, GPFS, DVR Content and DVR Index?

I wonder if the hard drive geometry needs to be much closer to the Western Digital drives that are being used by me and DCTneo...

chs4000

04-22-11, 12:41 PM

Which image did you load, and how did you go about it?
And also, can you post the Diagnostics menu numbers for total remaining bytes, and the bytes used by the System, GPFS, DVR Content and DVR Index?

I wonder if the hard drive geometry needs to be much closer to the Western Digital drives that are being used by me and DCTneo...

I will get you the information you requested. I followed the Active@ Disk Image (Windows-based) procedure, and it took about five hours to format the 1.5TB drive. I do have a 1TB drive I can try, a Western Digital "WD10EALS". Doing my best right now to liberate it of its data, so I can reformat it using the 1TB image.

chs4000

04-22-11, 03:38 PM

Here's your requested info:

http://olypen.com/lcowan/IMG_20110422_122251.jpg

http://olypen.com/lcowan/IMG_20110422_122308.jpg

http://olypen.com/lcowan/IMG_20110422_122534.jpg

TNO821

04-22-11, 03:55 PM

chs4000

04-22-11, 04:58 PM

qz3fwd

04-22-11, 05:03 PM

Yeah, it certainly decided to reformat the drive to 160 GB.

The fact that it displays 1000 GB doesn't really mean anything (and in this case, it means even less because the drive is really 1500 GB).

I ran a quick test where I popped a totally zeroed-out 250 GB hard drive in my DVR and it formatted it to 160 GB and still showed 250 GB on the Diagnostics screen.

So, for some reason, your DVR decided to reject the image and reformat it to 160 GB. The question is why...
Maybe the Seagate 1.5 TB drive was just too different from the Western Digital 1 TB drive that was used to generate the image.

Or maybe it goes back to the warning that the Motorola's don't like drives larger than 1 TB (I'm a bit skeptical of this).

I'll try to devise a test.

Are you sure both of your DVR's are using the same firmware/software levels?
Heck-they might have made changes to the filesystem or partition layout between releases and maybe the system say a problem like your image is a newer version than his dvr expected. They usually have versioning built into filesystems. I dunno, but this would for sure cause a problem, kinda like expecting Windows 1.0 to read a NTFS filesystem.

TNO821

04-22-11, 05:07 PM

Image write to the 1TB WD10EALS has commenced! ETA of five hours.

Is there any practical way I can upgrade the firmware from 18.76, or is there probably no benefit to this? The DVR I have seems to work fine with 18.76, but I don't know if I'm missing out on any features.
No, there is no way to update the firmware. The cable company is in complete control of that.

I doubt there are any substantial differences between your version 18.76 and my version 18.77.

chs4000

04-22-11, 05:11 PM

TNO821

04-22-11, 05:20 PM

Do they use custom firmware/software that might have a bearing on whether I can upgrade my drive, or do you have reason to believe that a DHC6416 under any cable company's jurisdiction should be capable of an upgrade outlined in the above procedure? My cable provider is Wave Broadband, by the way.
I would be very surprised if there were any differences that would prevent this from working. It's far more likely to be a problem with hard drive geometry or the 1.5 TB size of the Seagate drive, or even something messed up in my Active@ disk image.

DCTneo and I are on different cable systems and are using different firmware versions and even totally different models of Motorola cable boxes and I am using the image that was generated from his. If fact, he went to his brother's home to get the external drive formatted, and his brother is on a different system...so there is ample evidence to suggest that the problem probably lies elsewhere.

TNO821

04-23-11, 01:41 PM

Are you sure both of your DVR's are using the same firmware/software levels?
Heck-they might have made changes to the filesystem or partition layout between releases and maybe the system say a problem like your image is a newer version than his dvr expected. They usually have versioning built into filesystems. I dunno, but this would for sure cause a problem, kinda like expecting Windows 1.0 to read a NTFS filesystem.

It's possible, but I feel it's unlikely. Otherwise there would be a major caveat listed in those eBay sales where the 1 TB drives are listed (this is for sure the same method they employ).

And changing the version of the custom IBM GPFS filesystem could be a big undertaking that would require a *lot* of testing to make sure it didn't blow away DVR recordings, etc. And there'd be no benefit...we're talking about a maximum of 1 TB of data (2 TB, if your eSATA connector is enabled)...that's nothing for even the oldest versions of GPFS; that filesystem deals in petabytes on a regular basis.

I've been running some tests that suggest Active@ Disk Image is not as good as I had thought. It appears there may be a problem preventing the image from properly restoring on many drives (it may be a hard drive geometry issue). Everybody should use the Linux image to create your 1 TB DVR drive.

I'm continuing to test this and will provide detailed information as soon as I have it.

TNO821

04-23-11, 01:48 PM

Sorry all, but it looks like there is a problem with using the Active@ Disk Image to create your 1 TB DVR hard drive. I'm not sure how many would be impacted, but I strongly suggest you use wait until I finish some tests.

*****Update*****
There does appear to be a problem with the images, even the Linux image. I don't want to waste anybody's time, so I'd hold off on trying to image your drive until I complete a series of tests. This will take a while, as each test is several hours. Some could be up to 12 hours for an image to complete :( I'll keep posting results.

TNO821

04-23-11, 11:21 PM

While I continue looking into the imaging issues, here's (http://www.sendspace.com/file/m2k4ge) the original g4u (Ghost for Unix) image that I used to get my DVR upgraded to 1 TB.

I know for certain that it works with the Western Digital WD10EVDS (that's the hard drive that I'm currently using in my DVR). This is the image that was created by DCTneo from a Western Digital WD10EARS drive that he connected to the eSATA port of his brothers DVR.

It's a little tricky to restore the image, as g4u requires a FTP server. So most people will need two computers in order to do this (you could do it on one, but it would be more complicated for most people). I took screenshots of the process and will later put together a post that goes through it step-by-step.

For now, here's a fairly detailed overview (minus screenshots) of how Windows users can do this:

Part A - Install FileZilla Server
Download FileZilla Server from here (http://downloads.sourceforge.net/filezilla/FileZilla_Server-0_9_37.exe).
This is FTP software that will deliver the 1 TB hard drive image to g4u (Ghost for Unix). Take all default options when installing it.
*This will run on 32-bit and 64-bit versions of Windows XP, Vista, and Windows 7. If you use Windows Server, you can just use it's FTP software.

After installing FileZilla Server, go to the Start Menu and open it. You need to go to the Edit menu and choose Users. Use the Add button to create a new user. I suggest naming the user the same as your Windows login name. Leave all defaults for everything. (Important: Don't bother setting a password for the user, just leave it blank. If you insist on having a password, write it down; you'll need it in Part C)

Now that a new user has been added, you need to select a folder to use as its home directory. It will be easiest to select your profile folder (ex: mine, on Windows 7, is C:\Users\TNO821 ... If I was using Windows XP, it would be C:\Documents and Settings\TNO821)

That's it for Part A.

Part B - Extract the image file to your FTP home directory

Now you need to unzip the image file (downloaded from the link at the top of this post) to the folder that you set as your FTP home directory. Once extracted, you'll have a 927 MB "dctg4uc2.gz" image file. (The download above is only about 1.5 MB...it is a .zip file that contains the 927 MB .gz file). So in my case, I extract the dctg4uc2.gz file to C:\Users\TNO821.

Part C - Use g4u to restore the image file to your 1 TB hard drive

Now you need to use a second computer to run g4u and grab the image file from the FTP server. The easiest way to do this is to run it from one of the many Linux LiveCDs.

I recommend Ultimate Boot CD 5.0. You can download the .iso from here (http://www.ultimatebootcd.com/download.html).

Burn the .iso to CD and boot your computer with it (this will have to be a different computer from the one running the FTP server, and it will need to be networked with it).

At the boot menu, choose HDD > Disk Cloning > g4u V2.4.

You will then see the Welcome menu for g4u. Select the default option 1. Start g4u

It'll take a few moments to load up, after which you'll see a g4u> command prompt.

Type disks and press enter.
This will display info about the hard drives that g4u sees. You want to be sure to write down the name assigned to your 1 TB hard drive.
If, like me, you are playing it safe and disconnect all other drives except for your 1 TB hard drive (and your CD/DVD drive), you'll see that g4u assigns the name wd0.
(the second hard drive would be assigned the name wd1, and so on)

The only thing left to do is issue the command for g4u to pull the image from the FTP server and load it onto your 1 TB hard drive.
The command is named slurpdisk
The syntax is slurpdisk Username@FTP_Server_address Image_Name Hard_Drive_ID

So I typed:
slurpdisk TNO821@10.10.10.5 dctg4uc2.gz wd0

You'll then be prompted for a password (If you closely followed my directions in part A, you didn't bother setting a password). Leave the password blank and press enter. The image will now begin loading. This will take at least several hours.

The image is currently being restored to one of my WD10EARS drives and I will test it in my DVR by tomorrow morning.

The trickiest part of this whole thing is making sure that you have the permissions required to pull the image from the FTP server. If you get any access denied error messages when issuing the slurpdisk command, you need to make sure that your FTP user account home dir is set properly. You may also need to loosen NTFS security on the folder. Just follow my directions above carefully and you should be fine.

I also took screenshots which I'll add to this post later.

TNO821

04-24-11, 06:36 AM

I have triple-tested the g4u (Ghost for Unix) image with a Western Digital WD10EVDS and two different Western Digital WD10EARS hard drives. All of them worked.

As of this moment, I would only trust the g4u image, which you can download from here (http://www.sendspace.com/file/m2k4ge). I'm thinking that the boot sector may be getting jacked up by the other imaging programs.

I will focus my efforts on documenting the exact procedure to load the g4u image. After that, I'll investigate easier methods of loading it.

See my previous post for fairly concise instructions on loading the g4u image.

sailorickm

04-24-11, 01:45 PM

I couple of years ago I replaced the 120GB drive in my DCT6412PIII with a 160GB drive. It works fine. I thought that was the best I could do so I was thrilled to see this thread.

Question:

After formatting a 1TB drive externally and placing in the STB, can I put the old internal 160GB drive into the external enclosure to watch the existing recordings? Once they're all watched, I'll disconnect it and be fine with the 1TB internal capacity. I don't care to try to copy the shows to the new 1TB drive (if it's even possible?).

Thanks!

TNO821

04-24-11, 06:29 PM

I couple of years ago I replaced the 120GB drive in my DCT6412PIII with a 160GB drive. It works fine. I thought that was the best I could do so I was thrilled to see this thread.
The nice thing about the 120 GB to 160 GB upgrade was that the DVR auto-formats to 160 GB. To get up to 1 TB is way harder unless your cable company allows the use of external drives (only certain cable companies in Canada or South America do for Motorola DCH or DCT DVR's).

So it turns out that, because the internal SATA connection only ever formats drives to a maximum of 160 GB, we had to find somebody either in Canada or South America who was both a) on a cable system that allows the use of external drives, and b) willing to go to the trouble of hooking a 1 TB drive to the eSATA port (so that the DVR would format it to the full 1 TB size) and creating and uploading an image of the 1 TB hard drive. So big ups to DCTneo for doing that!

Question:
After formatting a 1TB drive externally and placing in the STB, can I put the old internal 160GB drive into the external enclosure to watch the existing recordings?
I doubt it, but maybe. First of all, nearly nobody using these DCT or DCH cable boxes are on a cable system that even allows for external drives. If you're on Comcast or Time Warner cable, forget about it. I think the best you can do is swap between having either the 1 TB or the 160 GB drive as your internal drive. This is totally doable, with the only drawback being that you'll have to power-cycle the DVR, which will lose your guide info (and takes hours to rebuild).

I don't care to try to copy the shows to the new 1TB drive (if it's even possible?).
for all intents and purposes, copying from one drive to another is impossible (due to the indexing and the esoteric nature of the IBM GPFS file system).

chs4000

04-24-11, 09:46 PM

Hi folks,

True enough, all attempts using active@ image have failed for me. I might try the alternate method tonight,using my WD10EALS, later tonight or tomorrow.

Thank you for your help so far.

sailorickm

04-24-11, 10:31 PM

I doubt it, but maybe. First of all, nearly nobody using these DCT or DCH cable boxes are on a cable system that even allows for external drives. If you're on Comcast or Time Warner cable, forget about it. I think the best you can do is swap between having either the 1 TB or the 160 GB drive as your internal drive. This is totally doable, with the only drawback being that you'll have to power-cycle the DVR, which will lose your guide info (and takes hours to rebuild).

Somehow I missed saying that I'm with Shaw Cable in Canada, so my eSATA port is indeed enabled. I had never used it, so after making my post I plugged in a small external drive that I have in a NexStar3 enclosure and got the message asking if I want to format it. I went straight to the store and bought a 1TB WD10EARS drive for $55, but then had to go to the inlaws for dinner before I got to work on it more. (I'm still there now...)

for all intents and purposes, copying from one drive to another is impossible (due to the indexing and the esoteric nature of the IBM GPFS file system).

I have 6 HDNet concerts on the 160GB drive that I haven't watched yet. I think I'll do this:

- format the 1TB externally
- install it to see that it works
- test the 160GB drive externally

If I can't read the 160TB drive externally, I'll have to put it back in and capture the contents with S-Video out. I had to give up with the firewire capture due to glitches. I don't mind the glitches if the capture plays through them, but I found some were so bad that VLC and MPClassic both hung at the bad spot. That may have been after running the repair program (I forget the exact name just now). I don't have the patience to cut and splice, etc. I don't want to archive the shows; just watch them once.

BTW, I never saw that DCTneo (from Saskatchewan) ever replied to say that he recorded and played back past the 160GB point on his 1TB drive. I sent him a private message this morning to ask.

TNO821

04-24-11, 11:16 PM

TNO821

04-24-11, 11:29 PM

Be careful when you hook up the 160 GB. If it asks to format the drive, say no!

sailorickm

04-24-11, 11:39 PM

Be careful when you hook up the 160 GB. If it asks to format the drive, say no!

Right! I already took a leap of faith with the 120GB drive that I plugged in. You or somebody said it would ask before formatting so I held my breath and plugged in my external Linux drive. All is well!

DCTneo

04-25-11, 01:39 AM

Well I'm using the image that DCTneo provided me (the g4u image), and I'm at over 90% capacity on my 1 TB. I've got waaayy waayy more than 160 GB of material on it (I posted screenshots of the 50% point).

Not yet, I'm at 10% usage which is about what I would expect given the amount of (mostly hi-def) stuff I've saved so far.

TNO821

04-25-11, 02:15 AM

Not yet, I'm at 10% usage which is about what I would expect given the amount of (mostly hi-def) stuff I've saved so far.
I'm currently at 96%. I'll post screenshots when I hit 100%

Here's the screenshots that I took at 75%:
http://i45.photobucket.com/albums/f100/TNO821/IMG_1504.jpg

http://i45.photobucket.com/albums/f100/TNO821/IMG_1506.jpg

http://i45.photobucket.com/albums/f100/TNO821/IMG_1510.jpg

I've been pretty much recording anything, focusing on movie channels and long 2+ hour movies. But I decided it's more fun to manually hunt around and pick the recordings (rather than just schedule a bunch of daily recurring recordings, etc.) and I've seen some funny, funny sh1t. Here's one of my favorites:

http://i45.photobucket.com/albums/f100/TNO821/IMG_1490.jpg
Hmmmm....clearly a kids movie...but NC-17? Epic.
For a split moment, I contemplated the possible existence of a special Director's cut where the voice actors just cut loose and perform the whole script "blue". Sort of like the Thundercats outakes (http://www.ebaumsworld.com/video/watch/382402/) from the late 80's that always makes me laugh. Sadly, I was crestfallen when I learned that the guide was straight up lying. How many kids tried and failed to watch that airing of "Cats and Dogs 2: The Revenge of Kitty Galore" because their DVR parental settings said no? We may never know.

chs4000

04-25-11, 05:56 AM

DCTneo

04-25-11, 10:16 AM

Both my PVRs have the WD10EARS green drive installed and I haven't really noticed any more lag than with the stock hard drive. There is only the slightest pause for 30-second skip. I would be surprised if a 7200rpm drive provided a noticeable performance increase in a Motorola PVR application. Very pleased with the performance. Have not tested with both tuners recording HD and playing back a HD video simultaneously, however.

TNO821

04-25-11, 01:12 PM

There's no lag issues. I'm at 97% and it behaves exactly the same as the old 160 GB drive did, except for having waaayy more space :)

The drawback to the faster 7200 RPM drives is generally heat/power consumption and sometimes noise. But if the drive is particularly quiet, that's all good.

TNO821

04-25-11, 01:13 PM

It seems to have worked! Will post more tomorrow.

Edit: I'm speaking of the ftp server/linux based approach. Took about 2.5 hours to format the drive, but it is a 7.2k rpm drive so don't expect such performance from an eco drive such as what most here seem to be using.

Which make and model of hard drive did you end up using? Would you mind posting screenshots of the Diagnostics screen showing the space stats?

chs4000

04-25-11, 01:47 PM

I'll post screenshots in a while. I'm temporarily using a WD10EALS, since that's all I had within reach. I'm not endorsing a 7200rpm hard drive at all, I was just pointing out that nobody should make plans with the expectation that their format of the drive will be done as quickly as mine. Ultimately I'll find a Samsung or Western Digital 5400rpm hard drive and use that -- I'll probably order it today. I'm partial to Samsung but I'll have to do research first to see which one's quieter. By the way, the 160GB HDD I took out of my DVR was a 5900rpm Seagate "Pipeline HD .2", the ST3160316CS.

chs4000

04-25-11, 03:07 PM

Any concern with the 4k sector size of the WD10EARS drives? I know these have caused problems in various cases, e.g. with operating systems that expect 512 byte sectors such as Windows XP and other/older operating systems. I think I'm inclining towards a Western Digital Green, as you guys have used with success, but I want to be certain the 4k sector size won't be a problem. Apparently it seems not to be a problem so far, in practice, I'm just wondering if that's accidental, or can be explained, e.g., maybe you're aware (yay or nay) if the Motorola DVR supports 4k sector sizes natively so the WD hard drive doesn't have to emulate them, such emulation supposed to cause significant (massive, actually) performance problems.

sailorickm

04-25-11, 07:25 PM

TNO821

04-25-11, 09:12 PM

Any concern with the 4k sector size of the WD10EARS drives?
I wouldn't expect any issues with the Advanced Format Drives...GPFS is all about storing massive amounts of data across all sorts of different physical volumes, so I'd expect it can handle it without breaking a sweat.

But I'll hook up one of my WD10EARS drives and start filling it up and see what the results are.

lambchops

04-25-11, 09:14 PM

First off, I want to thank TNO821 and NCTneo for all of the hard work getting this going. After several attempts with the previous images, I was able to successfully create one using the latest image and g4u. I've swapped the drives in and out so many times that I felt like I was doing a pitstop. My wife and kids were starting to become annoyed, so I'm glad that it finally worked.
I'm using the WD10EARS and I'm enjoying how much quieter it is than the original. I did have some problems getting the g4u program to work. The first problem was it didn't like my USB keyboard, so I had to use the PS2 dongle and plug it in there. The next problem was with my hard drive. I had to disable the ACHI and switch it in BIOS to IDE. The last problem was it didn't like my ethernet adaptor. I had to dig out an old 3com and use it. I think all the problems might be linked to my south bridge chipset.
After that it went very smooth and was completed in less than three hours. I only completed the swap yesterday, but so far, it is working perfectly. It's nice to record high def without worrying about constantly deleting old recordings.

TNO821

04-25-11, 09:18 PM

all I've been allowed to do so far is to format the WD10EARS attached externally to my DCT6412PIII. I thought it would take a long time but only took about 2 seconds.
Yeah, it only takes a couple of seconds because it's performing a quick format...it's not writing to every sector of the drive, just the bare minimum required to set up the 1 TB partition.

I checked my recording listings, and with the external attached it dropped from 60% to 0%. I thought it would say something like 8% ?
Wow, that is unexpected!

Next step is to put the 1TB in the STB. If it won't read my old recordings when the current internal drive is attached externally, I decided I'll need to put it back the way it was and capture the old programs. That's going to take a couple of days.
The more I think about it, the more I think there's a decent chance that the 160 GB drive will be able to work as an external drive. After all, the ability to spread recordings among different drives is the bread-and-butter of the IBM GPFS file system.

sailorickm

04-25-11, 09:29 PM

OK, I have the drive in. Well, I didn't remove the old internal drive yet; I just opened the case and put the cables into the new drive and rested it on top of the old drive, with the case open. I hooked it back up and the display flashed du1 or similar, then nothing. Then I pushed the power button. The display is just showing the last channel it waws tuned to (227). I can't tell if it's doing anything!

I don't remember exactly what it looked like when I replaced the 120GB drive with the 160GB, but I don't recall being confused as to if it was re-installing the software, etc. Now that the power is on, I can feel the drive thumping a bit. With the power off, it was a smooth vibration.

Do I just let it sit? Any idea how long before I see something?

sailorickm

04-25-11, 10:54 PM

Do I just let it sit? Any idea how long before I see something?

OK, silly me. I went back to the TV room a while later and saw that the TV was turned off (there's just a tiny little light). My daughter must have turned it off when I wasn't looking. I turned it on and the PVR was up and running. A bit of Guide info had been transferred already. I checked the diag screens and see the 1TB is recognized, etc.

The bad news: I put the internal drive in the external enclosure and got the message:

The external drive has been formatted by another cable box and must be reformatted to use with this cable box. All content on the external drive will be erased. Do you wish to continue?

So, I'll be putting the original drive back in for a few days while I scrape all my recorded shows off the old disk.

Still, I'm super happy to have this extra space! I've been drooling over the 500GB that the family gets to use on the DCX3400M in the other TV room. (It's a free rental we got as a promo.)

sailorickm

04-25-11, 11:35 PM

Just one last thing:

The internal 160GB drive had a jumper on 5/6. I don't know why. I suspect the 120GB that it replaced had that setting, so I did the same for the 160GB (WD1600AAJS). I didn't put any jumpers on the new 1TB WD10EARS. It was only in for a short while but I recorded 20 minutes on both tuners at the same time. It seemed to be working OK (and the DIAG showed the full size).

TNO821

04-26-11, 12:46 AM

I'm using the WD10EARS and I'm enjoying how much quieter it is than the original. I did have some problems getting the g4u program to work. The first problem was it didn't like my USB keyboard, so I had to use the PS2 dongle and plug it in there. The next problem was with my hard drive. I had to disable the ACHI and switch it in BIOS to IDE. The last problem was it didn't like my ethernet adaptor. I had to dig out an old 3com and use it. I think all the problems might be linked to my south bridge chipset.
That's a lot of obstacles to have to overcome :) It's good that the thing finally works!

It's nice to record high def without worrying about constantly deleting old recordings.
For sure! And it is ridiculous how much material fits on a 1 TB drive. I have to page down about 15 times to reach the end of the recordings!

TNO821

04-26-11, 01:31 AM

The bad news: I put the internal drive in the external enclosure and got the message:

The external drive has been formatted by another cable box and must be reformatted to use with this cable box. All content on the external drive will be erased. Do you wish to continue?
That sucks :( But thanks for running that test. Now we know. And I understand that to be 50% of the battle.

DCTneo

04-26-11, 09:07 AM

My kids have company and they're watching a movie, so all I've been allowed to do so far is to format the WD10EARS attached externally to my DCT6412PIII. I thought it would take a long time but only took about 2 seconds. I checked my recording listings, and with the external attached it dropped from 60% to 0%. I thought it would say something like 8% ?

That's right, if you're on Shaw Cable in Canada then your PVR should have eSATA enabled and will prompt you to format the new drive when connected externally. Externally formatting the drive using the PVR takes almost no time at all, apart from the time involved to actually source the necessary parts and open the chassis to install the drive. Upgrading from 120GB to 1TB yields more than an 8x improvement in recording capacity! It sounds like others are now finding success also.

Working in IT, I have the luxury of being able to choose amongst spare computer hardware to borrow to create the original drive image using g4u. The WD10EARS drive was externally formatted using my brother's PVR. I initially grabbed a spare Pentium 4 desktop computer (for pretty much universal hardware compatablity at this point) but the original image creation was taking so long I stopped the process and started over with a core2 quad processor equipped box instead. The restore process should be much less involved so long as the computer hardware isn't too exotic.

chs4000

04-26-11, 01:09 PM

I think we're too quick to dismiss the 4k sector size issue on these newer drives. It may very well be that their 512 byte emulation mode is satisfactory (though, it does reduce their performance by half). Since two digital streams might just be 6MB/s combined, perhaps it's alright, but I don't know what effects it might have at the outer edges of the platter where performance drops off appreciably anyway, then made worse by 512 byte vs. 4k, and/or what effects it might have on noise (vs., say, a drive that was perfectly aligned and didn't have to seek as much?), and what additional theoretical effects it might have on hard drive longevity. I admit to not understanding the full implications of 512 byte sectors vs. 4k sectors, but I know one of them is that the hard drive has to work harder when the partition isn't aligned properly. Work means noise, performance loss, wear & tear. Am I being overly concerned about this? Perhaps the fix is just to cross jumpers 7 & 8 on the WD10EARS, prior to putting the image on the drive with g4u?

This might be the drive to go with, for the overly-cautious:
WD10EVDS. It uses 512 byte sectors natively.

See here: http://www.wdc.com/wdproducts/library/SpecSheet/ENG/2879-701250.pdf

Availability online looks pretty good, perhaps $10 more than the WD10EARS.

TNO821

04-26-11, 07:05 PM

I think we're too quick to dismiss the 4k sector size issue on these newer drives.
Those are good points about the 4k sector drives (Western Digital calls them "Advanced Format" drives).

I will be swapping out my WD10EVDS drive out in favor of one of my WD10EARS drives. I'll leave it in my cable box for an extended period of time in order to test this (and I'll fill it up as fast as I can).

My guess is that since these cable boxes only have 2 tuners, even if there is a performance hit, it will not be enough to cause any issues.

But your point about hard drive longevity is a valid one.

Work means noise, performance loss, wear & tear. Am I being overly concerned about this?
They are good points. I had the WD10EARS drive installed in my cable box for a short period of time, and never noticed any noise. But I wasn't focused on noise. Plus I didn't record a lot of material...it never filled up to more than 2 or 3 percent before I swapped in my WD10EVDS.

Perhaps the fix is just to cross jumpers 7 & 8 on the WD10EARS, prior to putting the image on the drive with g4u?
I'm not sure what that would do.

This might be the drive to go with, for the overly-cautious:
WD10EVDS. It uses 512 byte sectors natively.
I really like this drive. The WD10EVDS is what I am currently using. I just managed to fill it all the way up and it runs like a champ. It's about $15 more than the WD10EARS ($69.99 USD at Amazon vs. $54.99 USD at Amazon), so you'll have to decide if the theoretical longevity (and maybe noise) issues matter that much to you.

As I said, I'm going to be swapping in the WD10EARS drive soon (probably later tonight), so I should have some information about the noise level within a couple of days. Obviously the longevity question won't be answerable anytime soon.

TNO821

04-29-11, 04:13 PM

Here's (http://www.sendspace.com/file/5shd3w) a tested working Linux/Unix dd image of the 1 TB Motorola DVR hard drive. Use of this image will allow you to perform the 1 TB hard drive upgrade without needing to use two computers (the g4u image requires a ftp server).

I've tested this using both dd and the much faster dc3dd, which is based on dd and includes updates useful for computer forensic investigation. It has been tested on a WD10EARS hard drive.

To use it, I recommend downloading and burining the Parted Magic 6.0 LiveCD from here (http://sourceforge.net/projects/partedmagic/files/partedmagic/Parted%20Magic%206.0/pmagic-6.0.iso/download).

Speaking of the WD10EARS, I've had one in my DVR for a couple of days and have filled it to about 25%. So far it has worked flawlessly and is very quiet.

Later on I'll post a step-by-step on how to perform the 1 TB hard drive swap using the Parted Magic 6.0 LiveCD.

sailorickm

04-29-11, 04:25 PM

Speaking of the WD10EARS, I've had one in my DVR for a couple of days and have filled it to about 25%. So far it has worked flawlessly and is very quiet.

My WD10EARS has been in for a couple of days now. I recorded 3 hours as a test and it says 2%. My 160GB would have said about 14%.

I had one strange thing after I first installed the drive. I installed it before going to bed 2 nights ago and the next day was re-programming my series recordings. I was in the middle of programming the 6th one when the DCT6412PIII suddenly rebooted. Of course, I lost the Guide info and and to wait all day before I could try the programming of the last one again. I was able to program it last night.

I didn't bother searching for sudden reboots like that. Excuse my laziness (busyness, really) but if this is a known issue please let me know. I've never seen it in the years that I've had this PVR and don't know if it's a sign related to the new drive.

That's all I've done so far. It's set to record 2 shows tonight and two more Sunday night.

DCTneo

04-29-11, 04:42 PM

I had one strange thing after I first installed the drive. I installed it before going to bed 2 nights ago and the next day was re-programming my series recordings. I was in the middle of programming the 6th one when the DCT6412PIII suddenly rebooted. Of course, I lost the Guide info and and to wait all day before I could try the programming of the last one again. I was able to program it last night.

I suspect the spontaneous reboot was an unrelated issue. Could it possibly have been a power fluctuation, or some sort of a system crash? I have a pair of DCT6416PIII PVRs with upgraded WD10EARS drives installed in them that are working great.

sailorickm

04-29-11, 04:52 PM

I suspect the spontaneous reboot was an unrelated issue. I have a pair of DCT6416PIII PVRs with upgraded WD10EARS drives installed in them that are working great.

Glad to hear that. I'll just have to see how it goes.

Could it possibly have been a power fluctuation, or some sort of a system crash?

I didn't notice anything else. Nothing else in the house rebooted or has a blinking clock. I suppose this could have happened over the years while I was at work or asleep. I wouldn't have ever noticed unless I tried to look forward through the guide within a few hours of a reboot. I don't often do that.

TNO821

04-29-11, 05:01 PM

I had one strange thing after I first installed the drive. I installed it before going to bed 2 nights ago and the next day was re-programming my series recordings. I was in the middle of programming the 6th one when the DCT6412PIII suddenly rebooted.
Whoa! I have not seen any such behavior. The only thing that sounds even close to that is the FireWire reboot bug which happens when a PC or Mac is connected to the cable box via FireWire (and, in rare cases, when a DVHS VCR is connected to the cable box via FireWire). If I'm remembering properly, you're familiar with that stuff from the How to record via IEEE 1394 (Firewire) to Windows XP (http://www.avsforum.com/avs-vb/showthread.php?t=403695&page=186) thread.

If you see any more strangeness, let us know...I haven't seen any behavior that differs from the original 160 GB hard drive. I guess it's possible that there could be a problem with your WD10EARS; if anything weird continues to happen, I would recommend temporarily hooking it to a PC and running Western Digital's Diagnostics (http://support.wdc.com/product/download.asp?groupid=608&sid=3&lang=en) tool for Windows.

sailorickm

04-29-11, 05:08 PM

Whoa! I have not seen any such behavior. The only thing that sounds even close to that is the FireWire reboot bug which happens when a PC or Mac is connected to the cable box via FireWire (and, in rare cases, when a DVHS VCR is connected to the cable box via FireWire). If I'm remembering properly, you're familiar with that stuff from the How to record via IEEE 1394 (Firewire) to Windows XP (http://www.avsforum.com/avs-vb/showthread.php?t=403695&page=186) thread.

Yes, that's me. My firewire was definitely dis-connected at the time.

If you see any more strangeness, let us know...I haven't seen any behavior that differs from the original 160 GB hard drive. I guess it's possible that there could be a problem with your WD10EARS; if anything weird continues to happen, I would recommend temporarily hooking it to a PC and running Western Digitals Diagnostics (http://support.wdc.com/product/download.asp?groupid=608&sid=3&lang=en)tool for Windows.

Thanks for the tip. I'll certainly report back if anything happens again. I gather the diagnostics are safe to run even though the drive is formatted with gpfs, etc?

TNO821

04-29-11, 06:36 PM

I gather the diagnostics are safe to run even though the drive is formatted with gpfs, etc?
Yes, as long as you don't select the option that writes zeros to the drive. There are four options that appear when you run the software: "Quick Test", "Extended Test", "Write Zeros", and "View Test Result". Everything except for "Write Zeros" is safe to run, regardless of the file system.

chs4000

05-02-11, 12:28 PM

My 1TB WD10EVDS is working perfectly after following the ftp/g4u procedure. So far I've recorded perhaps a dozen or two HD hours and I'm at maybe 15% capacity used, 85% free. . The drive is silent at normal listening distances, can't hear seeks even when I put my ear up to the drive.

I'm very grateful to you all for making this possible. Thank you so much!

DCTneo

05-02-11, 03:17 PM

TNO821

05-02-11, 08:40 PM

My 1TB WD10EVDS is working perfectly after following the ftp/g4u procedure...The drive is silent at normal listening distances, can't hear seeks even when I put my ear up to the drive.

Awesome! Glad to hear that it's working out. I also have been impressed with how silent both the Western Digital WD10EVDS and WD10EARS drives are. In some ways they're too silent...I can't hear them even when writing the image to the drive or writing zeros to the drive :)

I've continued to test the other Linux image (This (http://www.sendspace.com/file/5shd3w) one that uses dd) and can confirm that it definitely is working. I've tested numerous times on both of my WD10EARS hard drives (writing zeros to the drive between each test) and it works every time.

I'll be posting a step-by-step with screenshots soon.

BTW, I just found out today that you should NOT use a jumper on pins 7 and 8 on the WD10EARS. It DOES NOT work if you do that! Just leave the drive using default out-of-the-box settings.

TNO821

05-05-11, 07:05 AM

Here's a document with step-by-step instructions + screenshots about performing the 1 TB hard drive upgrade for any Motorola DCT or DCH cable box DVR:
PDF format (http://www.sendspace.com/file/3fzi4e)

XPS format (http://www.sendspace.com/file/8ibn3b)

**Note: If you have a DCX cable box there's no reason to do any of this. It has been reported that the DCX cable boxes are able to format the blank hard drive. I suspect that the maximum drive size is 1 TB, but I don't know for sure. My guess is that the DCX box would choke on any hard drive larger than 1 TB and would refuse to format it whatsoever. So, for example, if you had a 1.5 TB hard drive that you would like to format to 1.0 TB size for your DCX cable box to use, you would still need to follow these directions. But for anybody using a 1.0 TB (or smaller) hard drive, simply open your DCX cable box and swap the drive. Again: it is speculation on my part that the DCX cable boxes are unable to format drives larger than 1.0 TB, so you'll want to try that first because it'll save you a lot of time if it does work (and you're no worse off if it doesn't work). I'd appreciate feedback from DCX users who attempt this...let me know what size hard drive can be auto-formatted by the DCX.

*****WARNING: This will only work for cable boxes with HDMI. If you have a really old cable box that has DVI, this is NOT going to work*****
*****To be clear: if your cable box has HDMI, this IS going to work. Only extremely old Motorola cable boxes without HDMI won't work*****

Upgrading a Motorola cable box to a 1 TB hard drive

Requirements: 1 TB hard drive*, a USB thumb drive (of any size), a blank CD-R or CD-RW disc, and a PC with at least 312 MB of memory, a CD-RW (or DVD±RW) drive, an available SATA connection, and at least one available USB port.
*Technically you could use a larger hard drive such as a 1.5 or 2 TB hard drive, but you will still only end up with 1 TB of recording space (because the GPFS partitions being restored from the image are sized for 1 TB).

****IMPORTANT**** If your hard drive is capable of SATA 6 Gb/s, you need to switch it to 3 Gb/s mode! Your cable box DVR will not recognize it when running in 6 Gb/s mode. Switching it from 6 to 3 Gb/s usually involves changing jumper settings on the hard drive...you may need to visit your hard drive manufacturer's website for directions.

Time Required: This will probably only take about half an hour - 45 minutes of hands-on time, but the hard drive imaging process will take at least a couple of hours to complete. All said and done, you're looking at somewhere between 3 and 8 hours total, depending on the speed of your PC and your 1 TB hard drive. The actual time required to open the cable box and remove the original hard drive is only about 15 minutes or less. The time required to burn the bootable CD and use it to boot your PC into Linux and begin the image restore is only about 15 – 20 minutes max. The rest of the time is spent waiting for the image to finish restoring to your 1 TB hard drive. During the wait, your PC will still be very usable for other activities such as surfing the net; the Parted Magic Linux LiveCD is a very slick deal complete with Firefox and all sorts of cool stuff.

Part A – Prepare

1. Purchase replacement cable box security tabs from http://www.newelectronx.com/proddetail.php?prod=SPLUG

2. Purchase the special security screwdriver bit online. It is sometimes called a Gamebit and can be purchased from Amazon:
http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B000F78NBQ
or from newelectronx.com:
http://www.newelectronx.com/proddetail.php?prod=BITMOTO Note: Be sure to choose the 4.5mm size!

3. Review directions for opening a Motorola cable box http://www.instructables.com/id/Mod-your-Motorola-PVR-DVR-with-a-bigger-harddriv

4. Download the “MotoSTB_1TB.bz2” Motorola DVR 1 TB hard drive image file from http://www.sendspace.com/file/5shd3w

5. Copy the "MotoSTB_1TB.bz2" image file to your USB thumb drive.

6. Download the Parted Magic 6.0 Linux LiveCD .iso from http://sourceforge.net/projects/partedmagic/files/partedmagic/Parted%20Magic%206.0/pmagic-6.0.iso/download

7. Burn the Parted Magic 6.0 Linux LiveCD .iso file. (Windows users can use the freeware ImgBurn which can be downloaded from http://www.majorgeeks.com/ImgBurn_d4870.html

Part B – Connect the 1 TB hard drive to your PC

1. Shut down your PC and connect your 1 TB hard drive (be sure to connect it via SATA...do NOT use USB or it will take a shitload longer).

Part C – Image the 1 TB hard drive

1. Boot your PC using the Parted Magic 6.0 LiveCD. You’ll see the following menu, where you should choose “1. Default settings (Runs from RAM)” (Note: it’s probably best not to connect your USB thumb drive until after Parted Magic has started booting up.)
http://i45.photobucket.com/albums/f100/TNO821/A1.jpg

2. While your computer boots up, plug in your USB thumb drive.
http://i45.photobucket.com/albums/f100/TNO821/B1.jpg

It will take a couple of minutes while the OS files are copied to memory.
http://i45.photobucket.com/albums/f100/TNO821/C1.jpg

After the OS files have finished copying to memory, Parted Magic finishes booting.
http://i45.photobucket.com/albums/f100/TNO821/D1.jpg

The Parted Magic GUI interface is very easy to work with and is very much like Windows. Next we need to determine what name has been assigned to the 1 TB hard drive.
http://i45.photobucket.com/albums/f100/TNO821/E1.png

3. Go to Start Menu > System Tools > Erase Disk. This tool will display the name that was assigned to the 1 TB hard drive.
http://i45.photobucket.com/albums/f100/TNO821/F1.jpg

4. Choose the default option, External (dd disk) and click Continue…
http://i45.photobucket.com/albums/f100/TNO821/G1.jpg

5. The External Block Wipe dialog appears and displays the names of all detected drives. Make note of the name assigned to your 1 TB hard drive. In the example below, the name of the 1 TB WD10EARS hard drive is sda. At this point you can click Cancel to exit the utility.
http://i45.photobucket.com/albums/f100/TNO821/H1.jpg

6. Now you need to mount your USB thumb drive. On the desktop, double-click on Mount Devices.
http://i45.photobucket.com/albums/f100/TNO821/I1.jpg

7. In the Mount-gtk window, locate your USB thumb drive and click Mount.
http://i45.photobucket.com/albums/f100/TNO821/J1.jpg

8. Make note of the path where your USB thumb drive has been mounted to. In the example below, the path is /media/sdb1 (this will be needed later).
http://i45.photobucket.com/albums/f100/TNO821/K1.jpg

9. Now that you know what the names are for both your 1 TB hard drive and your USB thumb drive, you’re ready to issue the image restore command. Click on Start Menu > Accessories > LXTerminal. This will bring up a command prompt where you can issue the image restore command.
http://i45.photobucket.com/albums/f100/TNO821/L1.jpg

http://i45.photobucket.com/albums/f100/TNO821/M1.jpg

10. Issue the following command, substituting the names assigned to your USB thumb drive and 1 TB hard drive:
bzip2 –d –c –f /media/sdb1/MotoSTB_1TB.bz2 | dc3dd of=/dev/sda progress=on progresscount=500
http://i45.photobucket.com/albums/f100/TNO821/N1.jpg
(That’s a pipe symbol that seperates the bzip2 command from the dc3dd command.)

11. When the image restoration completes, it will show you how many seconds it took. If you divide the number by 60 and then by 60 again, you’ll have the total number of hours. This example took just over 4 hours to complete (This computer is old and a bit slow).
http://i45.photobucket.com/albums/f100/TNO821/O1.jpg

12. The only thing left to do is shut down your PC, remove the 1 TB hard drive, and put it in your cable box!

bmaffin13

05-17-11, 02:27 AM

Hey curious but is there any way to get my old recordings off of my existing internal drive and onto a 1tb drive?

chs4000

05-17-11, 02:33 AM

No, sorry.

TNO821

05-17-11, 04:18 AM

Hey curious but is there any way to get my old recordings off of my existing internal drive and onto a 1tb drive?
No. It's a modified flavor of a very esoteric file system (IBM GPFS) that is not supported by any utilities that I've seen.

The best you could do is perform a FireWire capture of those shows to your PC (this only works for stuff that is flagged as Copy-Freely, which varies from cable company to cable company).

bmaffin13

05-17-11, 09:11 PM

yea I figured as much but thought it would be worth asking since I haven't seem to come across a for sure answer. Read another posting somewhere where someone had said they had ghosted a drive. I wasn't sure of it since it was the only one post I could find saying so.

Now I go looking for a good noob friendly thread on capturing it :)

Thanks guys!

Hoglard

05-20-11, 08:33 PM

I hereby declare this thread as :D100% AWESOME!:D

I was too looking for ways to upgrade my DVR with no luck before I stumbled upon you guys!

I am getting the ball rolling now! I just bought WD15EARS (1.5TB) drive. Newegg has it for $55 shipped if you plug in promo code EMCKEHK38 this weekend. I do not mind the extra 0.5TB to get wasted as it was the same price and theoretically I should get slightly better performing drive than WD10EARS (1.0TB) if the number of surfaces (platters) is greater in the 1.5TB drive.

Furthermore, I could find only 2 differences in the specs of WD10EARS v. WD10EVDS:

WD10EVDS does not have Advanced Drive Format, WD10EARS does
WD10EVDS has 32MB cache v. 64MB cache in WD10EARS

So I concluded the drives should perform in our DVRs about the same. You can check the specs yourself here:

WD10EVDS
http://www.wdc.com/wdproducts/library/SpecSheet/ENG/2879-701250.pdf

WD10EARS
http://www.wdc.com/wdproducts/library/SpecSheet/ENG/2879-701229.pdf

Oh, and I have a request regarding the security tabs:

I am sure most of you who bought these plastic security tabs do not need all five of them (five is minimum ordering quantity). I just need only one, so if would you like to recover some of your purchase cost, I would be happy to buy it from you. Just send me a PM.

TNO821

05-20-11, 10:51 PM

I am getting the ball rolling now! I just bought WD15EARS (1.5TB) drive. Newegg has it for $55 shipped if you plug in promo code EMCKEHK38 this weekend.
That's a sweet deal! And at some future point, you could swap it with a yet-cheaper 1.0 TB drive.

I could find only 2 differences in the specs of WD10EARS v. WD10EVDS:

WD10EVDS does not have Advanced Drive Format, WD10EARS does
WD10EVDS has 32MB cache v. 64MB cache in WD10EARS

There's also some differences in the firmware...the WD10EVDS read/write heads are programmed specifically for DVR video operation over long periods of time...apparently the heads do something to guarantee even wear-and-tear (I'm not sure what all is involved).

But I've had the WD10EARS in my DVR for a few weeks (and I've kept it filled up to 99% capacity for most of that time) and it's worked flawlessly.

Oh, and I have a request regarding the security tabs:

I am sure most of you who bought these plastic security tabs do not need all five of them (five is minimum ordering quantity). I just need only one, so if would you like to recover some of your purchase cost, I would be happy to buy it from you. Just send me a PM.
I haven't actually bothered buying the security tabs yet. I agree that it sucks that they come in a minimum of 5. If anybody has purchased the tabs, I'm also interested in buying one.

Hoglard

05-22-11, 12:50 AM

I've kept it filled up to 99% capacity for most of that time.

Whoa!! How is that working for you? I mean, isn't browsing and paging through the recordings list bothersome now? (Hint: there is no wrong answer. Even if you do not like it, that would be like complaining about bad weather in Southern California:D).

TNO821

05-22-11, 02:26 PM

Whoa!! How is that working for you? I mean, isn't browsing and paging through the recordings list bothersome now? (Hint: there is no wrong answer. Even if you do not like it, that would be like complaining about bad weather in Southern California:D).
Ha! I guess I hadn't really thought about it...I haven't been watching a lot lately, so I haven't needed to deal with paging through it. Most of what's on there are movies that I never intended to watch...I just recorded them to fill the drive up quickly.

I find that the most annoying thing is the low-disk-space warning message that pops up every time I schedule a recording...I'd disable that warning if I could. And honestly, anybody with a 120 GB or 160 GB drive would see that warning message a lot more frequently in the real world.

As far as paging down through the recordings, it's really not that bad; the DCH3416 is fairly responsive. I can get to the end of the list by using the page down button about 15 times...but I guess it would be nice to have a button that could go directly to the end of the list.

sandbagger

05-24-11, 09:47 AM

A big big big thanks to the guys that made this possible TNO821 and NCTneo!!!

Mine is up and running as of last night, everything looks correct, just waiting for the guide to fill in to reprogram all my recordings.

One problem I did find and you might want to make a note for others is I purchased a WD10EALX 6.0Sata drive and the DVR would NOT recognize it at all( no HD installed). Then I placed the jumper on 5/6 to force it to 3.0Sata and it found the hard drive.

I cant thank you guys enough for this

j1194

05-24-11, 05:50 PM

I'm getting to 931gb and then i'm getting failed instead on completed any idea why this would be happening TNO821?

sandbagger

05-24-11, 07:37 PM

I'm getting to 931gb and then i'm getting failed instead on completed any idea why this would be happening TNO821?

Is it a new hard drive? Model#?
If its not new out of the anti-static bag, there might be a partition still hanging around that forces it to run out of room when it reaches 931gb???
Just a shot in the dark but if its not new, I would use the HD manufactures software and write zeros to the disk, or I guess you could use the one on the boot CD

Also if its a newer sata6 drive you could try using the jumper to force it to sata3 and see what happens

DCTneo

05-24-11, 08:55 PM

I'm getting to 931gb and then i'm getting failed instead on completed any idea why this would be happening TNO821?

I am using WD10EARS in both my DCT6416-III units (leave factory installed jumper settings, it's working for me).

So far the drives on the "confirmed working" list are:

WD10EARS - IntelliPower, 64MB cache, Advanced Format, 1,000,204MB formatted capacity
WD10EVDS - IntelliPower, 32MB cache, 1,000,204MB formatted capacity (intended for DVR/PVR and video surveillance applications)
WD10EALX - 7200RPM, 32MB cache, 1,000,204MB formatted capacity - (required jumper pins 5/6 for SATA3 mode)
WD15EARS (with 1TB image applied) - IntelliPower, 64MB cache, Advanced Format, 1,500,301MB formatted capacity

FYI, WD drives with IntelliPower may vary the rotational speed between 5400RPM and 7200RPM as needed.

The WD15EARS doesn't have any realized increase in capacity over the other drives listed, as it has the same 1TB image applied.

sandbagger

05-24-11, 09:46 PM

WD10EALX works but you must place the jumper on 5/6 to force it to 3.0Sata for the DVR to find the drive.

The problem JN1194 is having shouldn't have anything to do with the DVR as it fails during the Image restoration onto the drive.

What model of drive are you using, and has it been confirmed by others to work OK? So far on the "confirmed working" list are:

WD10EARS (leave factory installed jumper settings, it's working for me in both my DCT6416-III units)
WD10EVDS

Any others?

DCTneo

05-24-11, 10:48 PM

The problem JN1194 is having shouldn't have anything to do with the DVR as it fails during the Image restoration onto the drive.

My guess would be that the drive geometry may be different from that of the original image. What model of drive is it?

TNO821

05-25-11, 01:16 AM

I wonder if that hard drive is just a tiny bit smaller than the WD10EARS and WD10EVDS...maybe it's just barely too little space to fit the image.

j1194

05-25-11, 11:52 AM

Hi Guys and thanks for the quick responses.

I tried a second time after the failed status and i got the same thing over, each time took about 9 hours. I am using a WD Green WD10EARS 1TB drive. I bought the drive off of ebay (used), i thought the drive might be bad but I used the WD software and did the extended test over night last night and it returned no errors.

I also wrote zeros to the drive overnight. I started the process again this morning before I left for work and it seemed to be progressing at 2 times the speed as before. I'm hoping there was just a partition hanging around or something. Ill send an update when I get home from work.

Thanks!

j1194

05-25-11, 09:10 PM

Okay guys, still getting failed because its running out of space, see the attached screen shot. I dont know what the heck to do, do you think the drive will still work?

DCTneo

05-25-11, 09:59 PM

Okay guys, still getting failed because its running out of space, see the attached screen shot. I dont know what the heck to do, do you think the drive will still work?

I created the original image on a WD10EARS drive which is the same model as you are using (should therefore be compatible).

I had a thought about why the imaging process is getting an error at 931GB. After initial testing and writing zeroes to the drives, they were formatted directly afterwards and then the image was created. Check the jumper settings on your drive. Although I did not make any changes from the factory defaults I reviewed the jumper positions, I believe the Advanced Format jumper was enabled by default.

According to an article I recently found, enabling Advanced Format allows for an 7 to 10 percent more capacity on the drive:
http://gizmodo.com/5424631/western-digital-advanced-format-gives-you-11-percent-more-hard-drive-space

Not enabling Advanced Format could be why your imaging fails around 7 percent short (931 out of 1000 GB capacity). I would suggest enabling Advanced Format by setting jumpers 7-8 and retry imaging the drive:
http://wdc.custhelp.com/app/answers/detail/a_id/1679#jumper

Best of luck!

j1194

05-25-11, 11:12 PM

Thanks so much for your input, there were no jumpers set I will set them and retry and then report back!

j1194

05-25-11, 11:20 PM

Hmmm I'm trying it now but partition editor (in parted magic) still shows the drive at 931.01 gb

DCTneo

05-25-11, 11:59 PM

Maybe try writing zeroes to the drive first before imaging the drive. If it doesn't work I can suggest the following:

Edit: I noticed in your attached screen capture that the results were different than the screen capture posted by TNO821.

TNO821 (drive shows as 932G), images successfully:
1953525168+0 sectors in
1953525168+0 sectors out

j1194 (drive shows as 931G), has not yet imaged successfully:
1952476608+0 sectors in
1952476592+0 sectors out

Maybe the image that you downloaded could be corrupt, try downloading again and then re-imaging the drive?

TNO821

05-26-11, 01:44 AM

It looks to me that your WD10EARS has a slightly smaller number of sectors than mine or DCTneo's; all the HDD companies have factories in various different countries and crank out different revisions of the "same" HDD model.

Maybe the best ultimate solution would be if we could find a slightly smaller drive (maybe 750 GB) and get an image of it that could be used by anybody with a slightly-too-small 1 TB hard drive.

You're getting the vast majority of the image, so it's possible that all the needed info is getting copied to it (the vast majority of the info is zero's...and I'm not sure if there is any non-zero data at the very end of the image). I'd try putting it in your cable box and see if it works.

TNO821

05-26-11, 02:18 AM

Not enabling Advanced Format could be why your imaging fails around 7 percent short (931 out of 1000 GB capacity).
The hard drive isn't really 1000 GB (Gigabytes) in size. It's 1000 GiB (Gibibytes) in size.

If I understand it correctly, GB is a decimal representation of the size, while GiB is a binary representation of that same size.

A GB = 10 to the power of 9, while a GiB = 2 to the power of 30.
So that works out to be:
1 Gibibyte = 10^9 bytes = 1,000,000,000 bytes
1 Gigabyte = 2^30 bytes = 1,073,741,824 bytes

I think the most misleading thing is that the HDD manufacturers don't use the term GiB, they use GB and add a disclaimer on their packaging that a GB = 1,000,000,000 bytes. ...so they're redefining the value of Gigabyte to equal Gibibyte, sort of moving the goal posts if you ask me.

There's some discussion of it over at overclockers.com (http://www.overclockers.com/forums/showthread.php?t=232783).

So the HDD manufacturers say that 1 "gigabyte" is 1,000,000,000 bytes, but the way operating systems report space shows the same thing requiring 1,073,741,824 bytes. So that's about 6.87% smaller than the measurement that the HDD manufacturers go by. Take 1000 GB x 6.87% and you get 68.7 MB. 1000 GB - 68.7 MB = 931.3 GB.

So my revision of the WD10EARS may be just a slight bit larger, perhaps 931.6 GB, which is getting rounded up to 932 GB.

sandbagger

05-26-11, 09:32 AM

I am going to bet that the drive JN1194 got off ebay has bad sectors and is JUST small enough for the image to not fit.

Its been a long time since I have done a lot of drive level stuff but from what I remember.

Most drives have the ability to mark sectors as bad and skip over them. I am betting the drive had bad sectors, the drive has since marked them as bad, and has re-sized the drive accordingly. Simply writing zeros to the drive will not remove that info, it just writes to the known good areas skipping the bad.

Some drive software would allow you to go back in and erase the sector map and start over. It has been years since I have had to work on a drive to that level.

DCTneo

05-26-11, 11:19 AM

Hmmm I'm trying it now but partition editor (in parted magic) still shows the drive at 931.01 gb

I would try all those suggestions listed here, then regardless of how the drive images I would try it in the PVR to see if it works. It still might work even if the imaging technically fails, as not much info is actually written to the drive during formatting. If the imaging fails it may just be that a few zeroes haven't been written to the drive!

Hoglard

05-26-11, 06:19 PM

I am going to bet that the drive JN1194 got off ebay has bad sectors and is JUST small enough for the image to not fit.

Most drives have the ability to mark sectors as bad and skip over them. I am betting the drive had bad sectors, the drive has since marked them as bad, and has re-sized the drive accordingly. Simply writing zeros to the drive will not remove that info, it just writes to the known good areas skipping the bad.

I also believe this is the case. And that it originally took 9 hours is another clue pointing in this direction. Buy a brand new disk - I bet you will not have the same problem.

Some drive software would allow you to go back in and erase the sector map and start over. It has been years since I have had to work on a drive to that level.

I do not think this is the way to go, as the sector error map is most likely correct. I speculate if you wipe it out, you could successfully re-image the drive, but then you might end up with frustrating errors when using your DVR. I would buy a new drive for this.

Hoglard

05-26-11, 06:33 PM

sandbagger

05-26-11, 07:57 PM

If, and I personaly would just get a new drive, wiped out the map, I would then run a disk check to remap the bad sectors. But like I said, I bet its got enough bad sectors that the drive is smaller than 1TB

I do not think this is the way to go, as the sector error map is most likely correct. I speculate if you wipe it out, you could successfully re-image the drive, but then you might end up with frustrating errors when using your DVR. I would buy a new drive for this.

j1194

05-26-11, 08:10 PM

I ran an extended test and there are no bad sectors, I think it might be my IDE / sata dual mobo maybe it's something strange with it I'm gonna try on my laptop tonight and see the size it reports back! Thanks all

j1194

05-26-11, 09:09 PM

TNO821

05-26-11, 11:54 PM

Well connected it to my laptop's sata port and in partedmagic it shows the same thing 931.01 must be a manufacturing difference or something? im going to test the drive in the drv and see what happens hopefully the data at the end is all zeros!

Does anyone know if an extended test messes up data on the drive at all?
It shouldn't. The extended and quick tests should not write anything to the drive.

If the drive ends up not working in your DVR and you want to determine the real total number of sectors, I think that using Western Digital's Data Lifeguard tools for Windows shows the total number of sectors when using the Write Zero's option.

j1194

05-27-11, 12:33 AM

Hey guys connected the drive and it worked despite the failed message thanks so much for all your inputs.

DCTneo

05-27-11, 12:36 AM

Hey guys connected the drive and it worked despite the failed message thanks so much for all your inputs.

Another success!!! Assuming of course that the drive will remain OK....

TNO821

05-27-11, 01:15 AM

Boosh! Must just be a bunch of zeros at the end.

I doubt that the drive is ill...my bet is that it's just a different revision of that hard drive model that has a slightly different number of sectors.

Now I'm wondering how much smaller a drive could be and still work...
What if a 750 GB drive were used? Would the DVR still "think" that there was 1 TB of total space? What would happen when it hit that 750 GB physical limit?

***UPDATE*** I tried imaging a 750 GB Seagate hard drive with the 1 TB image and the cable box reformatted it to 160 GB. So it looks like your hard drive can only be just a tiny bit smaller than the WD10EARS used to create the 1 TB image.

DCTneo

05-27-11, 12:02 PM

I'll summarize the successful drive upgrades mentioned so far in this thread and which model of drives were used:

DCTneo (WD10EARS x 2) - DCT6416PIII x 2, firmware 16.53, Access Cable Saskatchewan
TNO821 (WD10EARS, WD10EVDS) - DCH3416, firmware 18.77, Comcast in the SF Bay area
chs4000 (WD10EVDS) - firmware 18.76, Wave Broadband
sailorickm (WD10EARS) - DCT6412PIII
lambchops (WD10EARS)
Hoglard (WD15EARS with 1TB image applied) - DCT6412PIII, firmware 16.75, only able to record ~150GB software limited by Cox cable?
sandbagger (WD10EALX, required jumper pins 5/6 for SATA3 mode)
j1194 (WD10EARS from ebay, imaging incomplete w. error but works anyways)
riley847 (WD10EARS) - DCT6416PIII
markj801
DCTneo's brother (WD15EARS with 1TB image applied) - DCT3416
Sitargo (WD10EVDS) - DCT3416, firmware 16.74, Cablevision (Mexico City)
dan74 (W10EVDS) - DCT3412, firmware 16.79, Flow Jamaica (Columbus Networks USA)
jimichunga working DCT3412
terraphantm (WD10EALX, required jumper pins 5/6 for SATA3 mode) - DCH3416, firmware 18.46
Alexander63 (WD10EARS) - DCH3416

Any additions or updates, let me know and I'll keep this post updated so long as I reasonably can....

chs4000

05-28-11, 12:16 PM

Hi TNO,

I'm happy to split an order of security clips with you. PM me if interested.

-John

Hoglard

06-01-11, 01:40 PM

Another success story: DCT6412III was upgraded with WD15EARS yesterday.

The only thing which I was not prepared for was what felt like more than an hour before the new system fully booted. For most of that time it was doing something at the boot-up screen where progress bar was showing 8 of 12 segments. I guess it was probably checking the disk (1.5TB formatted as 1TB).

Guys, I have a problem.

Everything looked OK when I imaged the disk last week:

Welcome - Parted Magic (Linux 2.6.38.2-pmagic)

root@PartedMagic:~# bzip2 -d -c -f /media/sdb1/MotoSTB_1TB.bz2 | dc3dd of=/dev/sda progress=on progresscount=500
warning: sector size not probed, assuming 512
dc3dd 6.12.3 started at 2011-05-24 21:10:08 +0000
command line: dc3dd of=/dev/sda progress=on progresscount=500
compiled options: DEFAULT_BLOCKSIZE=32768
sector size: 512 (assumed)
1953525168+0 sectors in
1953525168+0 sectors out
1000204886016 bytes (932 G) copied (??%), 9109.61 s, 105 M/s
dc3dd completed at 2011-05-24 23:41:57 +0000
root@PartedMagic:~#

But now I realized my DVR does not want to record any more shows. It looks like it thinks it does not have any more disk space, even though the diagnostic screen shows about 834 GB free:

http://i1221.photobucket.com/albums/dd468/hoglard/DVR_1-Copy.jpg

So far it recorded about 147GB so it might be hitting the 160GB hard drive limit in the firmware:

http://i1221.photobucket.com/albums/dd468/hoglard/DVR_2-Copy.jpg

Any thoughts? Did I do anything wrong? Or do we have an issue with the size(1.5TB) of WD15EARS?