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FiOS DVR failed and replaced but now eSATA drive doesn't work. Formatting needed?!?

I have had the FiOS HD-DVR set top box model QIP7232 V2, running smoothly for years along with an external eSATA hard drive (a 2TB Western Digital AV-G drive).

All was good until a few weeks ago, when the set top box crashed and would not respond. Verizon sent a replacement. The replacement set top box was activated easily enough. Of course everything on the DVR was lost, but the real frustration came when I tried to connect the external eSATA drive. Every time I tried to recognize the external drive, the reboot sequence would begin, and the box would go dark. I could wait an hour but nothing would happen. Hitting the menu button would "wake up" the box and finish the reboot process, but the external drive was not recognized. I must have repeated this at least ten times.

The Verizon technicians I talked to on the phone could not offer any solutions, though they admitted they knew nothing about external drives (when I asked one rep if I could talk to somebody who knew about external drives, he actually hung up on me).

Finally a rep suggested I try replacing the set top box yet again; so Verizon shipped me yet another QIP7232 V2. I connected everything, and am getting the same result. I am turning to the forum to see if you know of something I am missing.

At this point, the only theory I have is that the external drive might need to be wiped clean and/or somehow reformatted. Does that make sense? I'd been hoping to recover those myriad hours of saved programming, but that is starting to sound like a lost cause.

Thoughts?

Comments

Justin46

I do not have an external drive so I have no personal experience, but maybe this will help.

I believe I have seen a post here on the Forums or on another site saying that you can get past that kind of problem by first disconnecting the external drive, disconnecting power from the DVR, re-connecting the power, starting the DVR, then re-connecting the external drive (I think I have the sequence right).

I hope this helps. If not, well, hopefully someone with first-hand experience can get you going.

__________________________________
Justin
FiOS TV, 25/25 Internet, and Digital Voice user
QIP7232, QIP7100-P2, IMG 1.9.4
Keller, TX 76248 (VHO 1)

Markintx

You may want to plug into a fairly current PC w/ an E-Sata port and see if the drive can be seen thru the PC's E-Sata connection...if it can see it, reformat and try to connect it again to the dvr....

MercerNick65

Once your original DVR died, there was no way to recover the recordings on the external drive. The external drive is married to a specific DVR not, unfortunately, to an account. When a DVR dies, the external recordings become unaccessable.

Justin46

@MercerNick65 wrote:
Once your original DVR died, there was no way to recover the recordings on the external drive. The external drive is married to a specific DVR not, unfortunately, to an account. When a DVR dies, the external recordings become unaccessable.

Of course. But that should not stop him from attaching the drive to the new DVR, the drive will just be (or at least should be) reformatted and thus empty and usable.

__________________________________
Justin
FiOS TV, 25/25 Internet, and Digital Voice user
QIP7232, QIP7100-P2, IMG 1.9.4
Keller, TX 76248 (VHO 1)

Fis1

@MercerNick65 that's what I was afraid of. I was holding out hope that it wasn't true, but if the content is definitely lost, then I suppose I'll try reformatting the drive from a PC. Any tips on what file structure should be used?

Markintx

I remember reading somewhere in the past that 2TB will work, but the DVR code only uses 1TB of the Drive.

So I decided to add a spare drive to my DVR QIP-7232 P2. (R: 1.9.4, B: 16.13) So far it has been formatting for 2 days and also stopped my whole house dvr service to my other QIPs. I disconnected the drive, powered everything down and restarted router then QIPs, the whole house dvr features started up ok again. Conclusion: I have tried this multiple times over the last year and never got add space to work, it just keeps hitting the drive w/ format commands. I am now thinking that it has something to do with whole house DVR. I am thinking this may be causing your problem also....maybe your QIP was previously programmed for whole house DVR?

Fis1

It's not a mult-room DVR, so that's never been a problem.

OK this may be interesting:

I removed the eSATA drive/enclosure from my TV cabinet and plugged it into a PC. Nothing. Not recognized.
I removed the hard drive from the enclosure, connected that directly to a free SATA controller on my PC. It recognized and formatted the drive (single partition, NTFS).
I returned the drive to the enclosure. Powered it up, PC still didn't recognize it.
I plugged the whole thing back into the FiOS set top box. Went through the external HD setup process. Same thing. Set top box didn't complete the reboot sequence. External drive not recognized.

All things being equal, it feels like the eSATA enclosure has gone bad. The thing that's hard to swallow is that this would have happened at the exact same time the set top box failed.

I might blame something like a power surge except they are protected by a quality dedicated APC power filter, battery backup, and whole house surge suppressor.

sangs1

You might not like to hear this now, but it may have been the drive that was causing the original problem in the first place. I only say this from past experience.

I had - what I determined to be - a bad external drive cause a FiOS DVR to stop working completely, kept locking up and at one point wouldn't even reboot - just kept cycling through the reboot process. Almost replaced the DVR. Then, really, like a light bulb went off, I disconnected the external, rebooted the DVR and everything was fine. Checked the external drive on my computer and couldn't get it to work properly. Replaced it with a new external drive, connected it to the same DVR and everything has been fine ever since (knock wood).

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