F5S PVR Large Hard Drive Issue

[unknownginge]

Hey guys, ive got a F5S, and all working great. I'm trying to set up my PVR tho and hit a few problems:

It recognises my pen drives (using for epg and updates at the mo) and recodnised a 500Gb drive. However, i got a big 4Tb WD external. and it doesnt recognise it.

Details are, I have tried the 4Tb, formated MSDosFat (I use a Mac) which is Fat32, even partitioned to 2 smaller fat32 halves. I plug it in and nothing comes up. ive left it for a long time just to see if it was the size it was having trouble with but still nothing. However, when I unplug it, it does display that the drive had been disconnected. So it is recognised somewhere.

Anyone got any ideas?

Cheers

[bbb_uk]

What was sizes of the FAT32 volumes you were creating when you halved it? Was it 2TB each partition as i'm sure the maximum supported drive/partition size is 2tb with FAT32.

You know a 500gb works so can I suggest formatting to 500gb FAT32 partition (this has to be the first partition and master/main; not sure how mac handles partitions) and in fact for test purposes can you leave the rest of that drive as unformatted? I know it's wasted but it's a test for time being.

If you can create just one 500gb FAT32 drive from your 4TB drive and it works then maybe reformat to 1gb FAT32 drive (the rest of the drive being unformatted) and see if that works.

For clarification, can you say that the 500gb drive that works was that formatted with msdosfat as well as this would rule out that the problem is because msdosfat is maybe doing something slightly different which the F5 doesn't like ?

[unknownginge]

What was sizes of the FAT32 volumes you were creating when you halved it? Was it 2TB each partition as i'm sure the maximum supported drive/partition size is 2tb with FAT32.

You know a 500gb works so can I suggest formatting to 500gb FAT32 partition (this has to be the first partition and master/main; not sure how mac handles partitions) and in fact for test purposes can you leave the rest of that drive as unformatted? I know it's wasted but it's a test for time being.

If you can create just one 500gb FAT32 drive from your 4TB drive and it works then maybe reformat to 1gb FAT32 drive (the rest of the drive being unformatted) and see if that works.

For clarification, can you say that the 500gb drive that works was that formatted with msdosfat as well as this would rule out that the problem is because msdosfat is maybe doing something slightly different which the F5 doesn't like ?

Cheers BBB,

i'll check on that now and let you know how i get on. The partitions were 1 at 1.2TB and 1 at 2.8TB so that may be it.

Ginge

[unknownginge]

Ok fixed and working. This is a little weird tho.

Perhaps just for your interest BBB, I tried the single partition of 500Gb and left the rest unformatted, still no dice.

I looked at the 500Gb that works and its formated NTFS. Now, I thought it had to be FAT but alas, no. So, I reformatted the 4TB (firstly to a single 500GB then to my original 1.2 and 2.8TB) and it is in and working. I set the smaller one which is what i wanted to be the PVR, recorded and played back perfectly.

So, thanks BBB, your help did infact help me solve this but perhaps not in the way either of us suspected!

Cheers

Ginge

[bbb_uk]

I suspect maybe your fat32 formatter program may have done something ever so slightly different than the windows standard and in some way maybe this caused the box to behave as it did. Either the way it formatted the drive or the partition properties (like was the first partition set to/as the main/active one).

If you have any probs with NTFS (I have read that some have) then you may have to go back to FAT32 but maybe format it from an actual windows laptop/pc.