ex7000 HD+ USB Hard Drive trouble

[ruudvandan]

Hi, my EX7000 won't recognise my external hard drive. It updated the firmware easily enough through a pen drive, but whenever I try to access my hard drive it says "USB Device is not attached".

Tried a different USB lead, no problems with hard drive on my computer. Any ideas?

[BriTmaN]

I had the same trouble until I converted my drive from NTFS to FAT32, now all is ok

I went to the Maxtor website and downloaded the seagate disc utility (126mb) it will convert any drive for you to FAT32.

[dougiej1983]

i can't use my 120g hard drive as the slot is blocked off,usb that came with it is good enough for the ammount i record

[ruudvandan]

thanks BritMan - will give it a try now.

[simplysup]

For info:

Some testing here shows that the EX7000 will not recognise USB drives larger than (approx) 250Gb, so if your drive is larger, partition it: the separate partitions are then recognised.

My 500Gb Maxtor is happily recognised as two 250Gb volumes, and I can choose which "volume" to record to.

[ruudvandan]

thanks simply - I will give it a try with my 500 gig hard drive when I get it back from my mate

[ruudvandan]

got hard drive back from my mates, and no joy, formated to FAT32, 500 gig drive split into 2 equal partitions. It is a SATA drive with eSATA & USB interface.

Does this make any difference does anybody know? Does it need to be an IDE drive?

[shrekderek]

make sure you activate the drive mate if yiu use Swissknife to do your partions and format u will see the box to tick. The software is free

[ruudvandan]

I have used swissknife in the past, but now I have Vista and it's incompatible.

Anyway, I activated both partitions and progress has been made although still not working. Now it recognises when I add/remove the drive, but still insists nothing is attached if I try to use the PVR functions, same this happens when I go into the menu.

Any ideas what else might be up?

I'll have a play about with the partitions a bit more and see what happens in the meantime.

[ruudvandan]

Finally got it sorted - trouble was I also had my hard drive connected to my PC at the same time. Everything's now Kool Moe Dee

[Stevejeep]

I have a Maxtor 500 gig that I got from Tesco on offer today, I downloaded the utility fat32format following instructions found on a site called crapcontrol.com.
They were quite detailed instructions using the cmd box to run the commands. I am a novice but persevered and my drive is recognised and runs fine in one partition. I also for good measure ran the Format utility on the digibox as well.
Hope this is of help to someone. Regards Steve

[ruudvandan]

yeah i'm using a 500gig usb hard with one partition too - so don't know where the 2x 250gig idea came from - in fact i tried 2x250 and it only recognised one of them!

single 500gig partition all the way!

[fantata1]

I have an existing 160Gb USB HDD which I want to use with my EX7000. but it is NTFS and is about 1/3 full with data I want to keep. Does anyone know how to convert from NTFS to FAT32 without deleting existing content and without buying expensive software like Partion Magic?

[ruudvandan]

download Hiren's Boot CD - it has lots of useful partitioning tools on it (including Partition Magic). Just look through some torrent sites and it will be easy enough to find.

I assume that the full 160Gb is one partition. What you will have to do is:
1. shrink the partition, to just over what you need for your files(e.g. if u have 60Gb worth of files then shrink the partition to say 65Gb)

2. the unused space will then become unallocated - create a new parition using this unallocated space

3. Format the new parition as FAT32 and make sure it's set to active.

This should work, but don't have your drive connected to your PC and ex7000 at the same time because I did and the ex7000 wouldn't recognise that it was attached.

Hope this helps