DCT6412 Hard Drive Upgrade? - Page 10

OK, I am confirming the bad news that my Motorola DVR box with Cox software is NOT utilizing the full hard disk space available. The usage has stabilized now and diagnostic screen on the box shows about 840GB of free space, while DVR content takes about 140GB (the rest is for the system, file system, and DVR index).

Until Cox Communications fix their "Cox customized" DVR software, we do not get to benefit from any hard drive bigger than 160GB.

Just FYI: I've read that with the Motorola DCX cable boxes, you can simply swap in a larger hard drive (I think there's still a 1 TB limit) and it will automatically format and use all of the space. So for a DCX cable DVR there's no need to waste time imaging the drive.

That said, I think it's a bad idea to use a DCX cable box, due to their numerous problems that don't occur on the DCH or DCT cable set top boxes. (broken FireWire and the "black screen recording" problems in particular).

I've updated the main post with this info as well as the info about needing to set SATA 6 Gb/s hard drives to 3 Gb/s mode.

After what seemed like an eternity I got my receiver fixed and I also bought a bigger disk for my DCT (WD10EVDS). I wrote the GPFS image to it, I replaced the old disk in my DVR (120GB Seagate Barracuda 7200.7) and I've been recording for almost a week now HD shows to make sure I can use the entire capacity. Good news - it works as expected! I'm a happier bunny!

FYI - once I installed the new (imaged) disk my DCT3412 reported 971,316,920,320 bytes "remaining capacity". After recording some 120 HD shows (around 18 pages in "recorded shows" menu! ) it now reports "99% full" and 968,422,158,336 bytes used for "DVR content". So everything works great

On top of that I am very impressed by how quiet and fast the WD10EVDS is - it really is "silky smooth". FFWD and RWD are much quicker, smoother and quieter. I'd say the 10 bucks more for the special DVR firmware is worth it.

For reference: my own Motorola DCT3412I box (platform version 16.79, application version Echo_DCT 35.72), provisioned and operating on Flow Jamaica (Columbus Networks USA), WD10EVDS 1TB HDD, MotoSTB_1TB.bz2 image (thanks again DCTNeo for providing the initial much sought-after image! And thanks TNO821 for putting it in the convenient dd+bzip2 format).

Now I only wish my DVR had an "erase all recorded content" menu item )

Cheers!
Dan

Yeah, I second that request! Mass deleting recordings sucks pretty bad on Motorola cable box DVR's.

Depending on your software and guide version, you may have a "Manage My DVR" menu with "DVR Cleanup" as an option. It presents all of your recordings with checkboxes that you can mark...after marking all that you want to delete, you select the Delete button and they all get wiped out. It's not super-fast, but it sure beats deleting them one-by-one where you're asked to confirm each deletion (it probably cuts down the clicking by 75%). But it sure would be nice to be able to delete everything all at once (without reformatting and losing all customized settings/series recordings, etc).

Anyways, I'm happy to hear that the larger hard drive is working out for you!

No "Manage My DVR" or "DVR Cleanup" menu on my box, but it's OK, I've already deleted everything - not so bad after all. I don't expect I'll have any need for "mass deletion" going forward, anyway. I guess they didn't see us installing 1TB drives )

Does anyone have a link for the 1TB Motorola DCT3412 image?

It's the same image as the 6412. There's only one 1 TB image, and it works for all of the DCT and DCH DVR's.

Word, I'm dumb and missed this post - http://www.avsforum.com/avs-vb/showp...&postcount=201


Thanks!!

Hells yes! Working like a charm!!!!


TAHNKX GUISE!!!

Awesome! Enjoy!

Hi, I'm planning on doing this upgrade soon on my DCH3416... Does anyone know if there are any software variants besides the one installed on Cox boxes that causes the device to only use 160GB? I'm somewhat concerned because the software on my cable box is rather old. My menu looks a lot like the image posted above (except it has my cable provider's logo), and the software installed on my box is ancient (18.46 - August 2008 build). Here are some pics:





Also if anyone has one of those plastic security tabs to sell, I'd gladly buy one off you. Don't really want to order 5

Hi Terraphantum. I recently upgraded a DCH3416 with the WD10EARS. The security tabs cost $34 with shipping, which seems a bit much for a little piece of plastic. PM me and I'll help you out. I was concerned about buying the 4.5 mm tool because a 4.5 mm socket is way too big; however, the 4.5 mm gamebit is just the right size. Also, the Unix command line gave a file or folder not found error for MotoSTB_1TB.bz2 so I renamed the file something simpler and it worked. Probably my error somehow but as long as I stared at the command line, I could not see what was wrong. My computer didn't have a spare SATA connector so I swapped with the existing HD since I was booting off the Unix CD anyway. Lost the guide when I unplugged, of course, but also lost programmed shows and series. Favorite lists and saved searches survived. I'm using a bit less than 1 percent per hour of HD. Speed of all functions unchanged. Can't hear the drive. Thanks TNO821--great job!

Hi All,

I just wanted folks to know that I found the 4.5 mm tool and a anti-tamper tab on ebay for US$10.49, with free shipping from a seller in canada. From the ad:

Combo - Security Bit & Plastic Anti-Tamper Tab DCT6416
This is your standard security tab & 4.5mm security bit for Motorola Cable Receivers. Compatible with Motorola DCT5100, DCT6200, DCT6208, DCT6412, DCT6416, DCT3412, DCT3416, DCH6200, DCH6416, DCH3200, DCH3416, DCX3400 and many more.

seller: freehdtv2010

I have no affiliation with this seller and have never used them.

I already have the tool and am going to try to get the tab from another user here, but I thought this might be good info for others in the future.

Chris

I'm not aware of any other systems besides Cox that can't use more than 160 GB of DVR space. With your software being so old, it's a distinct possibility. But one way to look at it is, even if it does only use 160 GB, the newer hard drive will be quieter and run cooler

Yeah, I was noticing the same thing regarding the Saved Searches (I've never used Favorites Lists, so thanks for letting me know it behaves the same way).

My first assumption was that Saved Searches were being stored on a server at the cable company, which struck me as pretty cool b/c you could swap out the DVR and still retain those searches. But alas, it's not nearly that cool...they're simply storing it in flash memory instead of storing it on the hard drive. I found this out the hard way a few months ago when I exchanged my DVR for another.

That's a really good deal!

Haha that's true - at ~$60 for the drive it's not really a big deal. At worst I'll just stick it in my PC and have another TB to play with. Currently formatting the drive and will stick it in the cable box soon. Guess I'll just record a bunch of things over the next few days to see if it gets past the 160GB point.

Edit: thanks for the tip on the anti tamper piece + screwdriver combo. I don't really need the screwdriver, but $10 shipped beats $35 shipped!

Let us know how it works out.


It is a good deal, but don't credit me for finding it. That was chris_h2's find.

Well I got the drive installed and so far it's working fine - performance is much better (especially FF and rewind). I do have one concern though; diagnostic does show about 900GB free, but page 2 indicates that "total size" is 160GB. Not really sure what to make of that





I do have a ton of HD recordings scheduled, but it might still take some time to get to the 160GB point.

FWIW - As you can see the drive I installed is the WD10EALX. It's 1TB, 32MB Cache, and 7200RPM. It's a SataIII drive, so I put the jumper to limit it to SATAII. When I was testing it in my PC it was extremely fast... 120-150MB/s writes! Drive that was originally in the cable box was a WD1600AAJS (I think it's a 160GB/8MB Cache/7200RPM drive)

Yeah, that's new to me. I don't know what to expect...page 1 was certainly showing that you have well over 800 GB of remaining recording space, but that anomaly on page 2 is strange. It is possible that the thing will simply stop recording when it hits 160 GB.

Keep continuously recording HD content on both tuners (just record crap you'll never watch, such as infomercials overnight) and it should not take long to get up to (or past) 160 GB of recordings.

Come back to that diagnostic screen and do the math to see when you've exceeded 160 GB. If you manage to get past it, I would expect it to let you go all the way to 1 TB.

Well, I remember seeing that on mine. (I have Cox Cable, with the 160GB firmware problem). Let me get home and I will check it tonight...

Well I got past 160GB and it's still going, so I guess everything is working. Don't know why it says 160GB, but as long as it doesn't effect anything I won't complain.



Just want to thank everyone who made this possible, finally getting some real use out of this DVR

Very nice! Looks like you've already recorded 194 GB of stuff, so I think you should be fine. Let us know if it lets you record the full 1 TB.

Updated list of all those with confirmed successful drive upgrades in this thread:

http://www.avsforum.com/avs-vb/showt...4#post20494374

Adding to the list of working 1TB internal drives for the 6416 Phase III (F/W 16.76):

Seagate Pipeline HD .2, model ST31000322CS. This is a Seagate DVR drive and was initially used for a year or so as a 160GB format. I've also run a 500GB version (ST3500312CS) as a 160GB format daily driver.

Western Digital Caviar Green WD10EADS-98M2B2 and WD10EADX-00T. The model number listed on the retail box for both of these 5400 RPM drives is WDBAAY0010HNC-NRSN. They are not Advanced Format drives. The EADS is the one that is currently installed in the 6416 and it appears to be functioning as it should (52% full). I've not seen any issues arise from recording two HD channels at the same time.

The local cable company does support external hard drives (hence formatting) for the 6416 but the whole hair-pully thing was going to result in baldness if I continued to speak with Customer Service so I moved on to the MotoSTB_1TB image method for all three of the above drives (thanks for posting that up TN0821).

I used G4L (Ghost for Linux) in the RAW mode (local disk) to clone the contents of the larger Seagate (@ 160GB) and the clone works as it should. It did occur to me to have a go at moving the original Seagate contents over to one of the formatted (image) 1 TB WD drives then try extending what is the 'DVR Contents' partition but I'll skip the details and simply say that I hit a bit of a wall on that. Leaves me pining for the earlier firmware [pre Oct/Nov 2010] Scientific Atlanta box that magically did all of this for you.

Interesting...I'm surprised that G4L was able to copy from the larger drive to the smaller, as I am fairly positive it can't read the GPFS file system. Did the raw mode copy just copy any data on the drive (and maybe the rest had been zeroed out and was therefore ignored)?


Were you able to even see the partitions (even just their volume labels)? I'd actually love to hear the details. I've had zero success reading the GPFS file system, so any info you could share may prove useful.

I've read that the GUID identifiers for the file system were altered by Motorola in order to make things even trickier, so that may have impacted you.

But I'm glad that the whole thing worked out for you. And thanks for the info on the hard drive models!

The wall I referred to is partially a bit of a PC hardware issue, specifically, the PCI SATA II RAID card. In some instances the target drive appeared to be treated as a logical drive and this was messing with things. G4L didn't seem to mind it so much, at least for straight ahead cloning.

Based on what I have read about the Motorola 64** over the years (and no doubt a lot of it forgotten), the hard drive is set up with two partitions, the one containing the recorded content being encrypted, the other not. That said, below is one example of what G4L saw with a source drive and a target drive in the cage. From my sparse, scribbled notes (hopefully with no transcription errors) we have:

( ) sda ____488386584 - DISK

( ) sda1 _____2929685 -- DISK

( ) sda2 ___ 151123047 - DISK

( ) sdb ____976762584 - DISK

( ) sdb1 _____3906250 - DISK

( ) sdb2 ____95846092 - DISK

I could select a whole disk, say, sda; or either sda1 or sda2, but not both sda1 and sda2 at the same time. Selecting the whole disk leaves one with another 160GB format on the target disk; yes, a perfectly working clone but not what I set out to do.

I did run a partitioning program that was on the Parted Magic disc whilst the drives were connected, just to see what it would see, and what came out of that for one of the WD 1TB drives with the MotoSTB image was /dev/sda (931.51 GiB) Partition: unallocated | File System: unallocated } Size: 931.51 GiB. Ditto for the 500GB Seagate loaded with content (just a different size). I believe that this program does not officially support GPFS.

Up until your comment about Motorola messing with the GUID identifiers, my main concern in all of this was that the 6416 firmware was going to interfere with the grand plan. At all events, I've got one more iron in the fire (after I straighten out the RAID card) so I won't give up just yet.

I'm going to edit my earlier post and remove the part about the larger to smaller clone (local disk to local disk). I'll report back once I'm able to confirm if the 500GB Seagate is the one that holds the 160GB clone and that I didn't lose track in the shell game of four drives, multiple formats and two cloning sessions. Please be patient, it will be a few weeks before I can get to it. Suffice it to say for now that G4L will make a perfect working clone of a 64** hard drive using the RAW mode (for unsupported file types).

Awesome! That'll be great to see what we can figure out. Ideally I'd like to get my hands on a IBM GPFS driver for either Linux or Windows (I know that there is one for Windows Server 2003, but getting it could be beyond difficult). And then I'd like to use a hex editor to change the modified partition GUID's to the normal IBM GPFS partition GUID (which is {37AFFC90-EF7D-4E96-91C3-2D7AE055B174}, according to Wikipedia) and see if the contents of the drive can be read.

We still wouldn't be able to grab shows off of the drive (becase they are doubtless encrypted and can only be played back on the DVR that recorded them) but we may be able to expand the partition size. Frankly I think it'd be pretty cool just to be able to see the files.

So is the objective to go beyond 1TB storage in the Motorola DVR unit? That would be nearly mind-boggling, but in a good kind of way. One of my upgraded 1TB DVR units are 57% full, including 53 hours of Sesame Street episodes (which my daughter loves) in HD. I also have a few series recordings that I intend to catch up on during the colder months. Admittedly, my wife is a much more frequent TV watcher than I am but I like to geek out and improve on most things mechanical or electronic.

Flacido, I understand much of your earlier post but am not sure what to add (if anything) to the summary of confirmed working drive setups that I have referenced above. If you have anything I should append to the post just let me know.

Well...eventually. But there are a number of difficult problems to resolve first, so I'm not getting my hopes up that we'll be able to get past the 1 TB barrier.

For now I just want to see what we can learn about the IBM GPFS file system. I haven't even been able to read anything from it, not even partition names, etc.