DCT6412 Hard Drive Upgrade? - Page 7

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.

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.


Wow, that is unexpected!


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.

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?

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.)

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).

That's a lot of obstacles to have to overcome It's good that the thing finally works!


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!

That sucks But thanks for running that test. Now we know. And I understand that to be 50% of the battle.

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.

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/librar...879-701250.pdf

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

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.


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.


I'm not sure what that would do.


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.

************************************************************ ************************************************************ ***************
*****DISCLAIMER: The following post is outdated and the steps should not be performed. If you are looking to upgrade your DVR hard drive to 1 TB, see this post! *****
************************************************************ ************************************************************ ***************



Here's 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.

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.

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.

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.

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


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.

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 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 tool for Windows.

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


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?

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.

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!

You're welcome, another confirmed successful upgrade!

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 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.

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
(Note: If you have a Motorola DCX cable box, the instructions are way easier and are briefly discussed a few paragraphs below this, where it says "**Note: If you have a DCX cable box" )

A .pdf version of this guide can be downloaded from:

PDF format

Special note about sendspace.com: Like all free file hosting websites, sendspace has misleading ads that invariably include a "download" link. There tend to be 3 or 4 of these fake download link ads surrounding the real download link. The one that you want to click on will have a blue background and will be labeled "Click here to start download from sendspace". It tends to be smack in the middle of the web page. If you click any of the other download links, you'll be downloading something that you likely aren't interested in, such as an ad-driven download manager, etc.

***Note to Cox cable customers: It used to be that Cox cable used older firmware/software that was not able to record more than 160 GB to the hard drive (even if you follow these directions and properly install a 1 TB hard drive.)  We now have a confirmed report of a Cox customer following these directions and successfully upgrading to a 1 TB hard drive (reported in Oct 2012. The DVR model was a Motorola DCH3416)...feel free to give this a try.  However if you are in a Cox Cable area that is still using older firmware/software, it is possible that you will only be able to record 160 GB of material.  But I feel that there is a strong chance that Cox has rolled out an update to all of their subscribers and that you will be able to fully use the 1 TB of recording space.  Special thanks to Flash2 for reporting the successful upgrade!

**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 (also known as "Anti-Tamper Tabs") from http://hdtvsales.ca/product.php?productid=16551 or at: http://www.newelectronx.com/proddetail.php?prod=SPLUG

    Check both websites because I've seen the prices change a lot...it used to be that newelectronix.com would only sell you a minimum of 5 of the security tabs, but that appears to have changed.

    *Also consider the shipping charge before making your final decision!

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!

 

  NEW: http://hdtvsales.ca/product.php?productid=16554 is now selling a combo that includes both the 4.5mm security screwdriver bit and the security tab (Also known as an "Anti-Tamper Tab")

3. Review directions for opening a Motorola cable box http://www.instructables.com/id/Mod-...igger-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/part...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.)




2. While your computer boots up, plug in your USB thumb drive.



It will take a couple of minutes while the OS files are copied to memory.




After the OS files have finished copying to memory, Parted Magic finishes booting.




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.




3. Go to Start Menu > System Tools > Erase Disk. This tool will display the name that was assigned to the 1 TB hard drive.




4. Choose the default option, External (dd disk) and click Continue…



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.



6. Now you need to mount your USB thumb drive. On the desktop, double-click on Mount Devices.



7. In the Mount-gtk window, locate your USB thumb drive and click Mount.



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).




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.






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

(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).


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!

Edited by TNO821 - 10/20/12 at 3:43pm

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

No, sorry.

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).

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!

I hereby declare this thread as 100% AWESOME!

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/librar...879-701250.pdf

WD10EARS
http://www.wdc.com/wdproducts/librar...879-701229.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.

That's a sweet deal! And at some future point, you could swap it with a yet-cheaper 1.0 TB drive.


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.


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.

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).

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.

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