I successfully upgraded my 2 year old UTV unit with one of those Western Digital 120gig harddrives I snagged on sale at Circuit City for about $100. I figured I could do it easily, although I was a little worried that I'd wreck a perfectly good reciever that has faithly served me well for the past 2 years or so.
The actual harddrive installation and upgrade went smoothly. Unfortunatly, I noticed that stupid little fan inside my unit crapped out (after all, this unit was practially on continuously for the past 2 years). So, off to the Rat Shack to get another fan. It took a little coaxing, and a little work with the Dremel Tool, but I got the new fan to fit and work. I had to splice the connector from the old fan onto the wires on the new fan so I could plug it into the UTV motherboard.
It also took a couple of tries to get the old harddrive to "unlock". My unit had a Western Digital 45gig harddrive (Model #WD450AW-45BEK0), not the Seagate drives that I keep hearing about. I was eventually successful in getting the drive "unlocked". I downloaded the diagnostic (Data Lifeguard) utility from the Western Digital website and ran it (I ran the extended test, which wrote zeros in every sector). It found one bad sector on the drive, but it succesfully relocated the sector and it was good as new (I reran the test to make sure). I stuck it in a spare PC I had laying around (which had no drives) and managed to install Windows 2000 on it.
This is pretty sweet - now I got 105 hours of recording capability on my UTV and I got a nice 45gig harddrive I can use in one of my PC's
Thanks for the great info on this forum. I spent most of the time just reading things instead of posting. Wanted to let you all know of somebody else that was able to successfully upgrade the harddrive in the UTV and also to get the old harddrive to work in a PC.
Also to add - my UTV receiver is the RCA DWD490RE.
The actual harddrive installation and upgrade went smoothly. Unfortunatly, I noticed that stupid little fan inside my unit crapped out (after all, this unit was practially on continuously for the past 2 years). So, off to the Rat Shack to get another fan. It took a little coaxing, and a little work with the Dremel Tool, but I got the new fan to fit and work. I had to splice the connector from the old fan onto the wires on the new fan so I could plug it into the UTV motherboard.
It also took a couple of tries to get the old harddrive to "unlock". My unit had a Western Digital 45gig harddrive (Model #WD450AW-45BEK0), not the Seagate drives that I keep hearing about. I was eventually successful in getting the drive "unlocked". I downloaded the diagnostic (Data Lifeguard) utility from the Western Digital website and ran it (I ran the extended test, which wrote zeros in every sector). It found one bad sector on the drive, but it succesfully relocated the sector and it was good as new (I reran the test to make sure). I stuck it in a spare PC I had laying around (which had no drives) and managed to install Windows 2000 on it.
This is pretty sweet - now I got 105 hours of recording capability on my UTV and I got a nice 45gig harddrive I can use in one of my PC's
Thanks for the great info on this forum. I spent most of the time just reading things instead of posting. Wanted to let you all know of somebody else that was able to successfully upgrade the harddrive in the UTV and also to get the old harddrive to work in a PC.
Also to add - my UTV receiver is the RCA DWD490RE.
