External Hard drive recording issue F5S

[DigitalVandal]

Connected powered 3.5" hard drive caddy with hitachi 1TB hard drive in it and have formatted with fat32 with no success, NTFS with no success and RAW and asked the box to format with no success.

Without hard drive connected, all in PVR area are greyed out. With HDD connected PICONS and the top one are lit and accessible but not the PVR settings menu and nothing records with the message 'No record partition' on the screen. Pulling my hair out now. Any suggestions?

[hellraiser stuart]

Can it handle a 1tb hard drive ? I have put a 500gb hard drive in mine. Have you tryed something smaller ? The size might not make a difference but worth atry

[DigitalVandal]

There was me thinking size doesn't matter :P

It turns out my hard drive has issues so would explain why it's not working. Even windows requires a new drive letter each time I plug it in.

[DigitalVandal]

Fixed the HDD so that it picks up every time on the computer but the F5S doesn't see it properly. Tried FAT32 and NTFS. The discs file system has been messed about with a lot so it could be something underlying. It may need someone massively technical to work this out or trial and error for me. I'm not sure.

[bbb_uk]

Have you ran chkdsk drive: /f on the drive whilst it's connected to computer to check and repair errors.

Once done and if it still doesn't make any difference then create two partitions (each 500gb) and format the first one as FAT32 and make it the main/active partition.

[DigitalVandal]

OK will give that a go. I ran chkdsk in cmd and check disk in windows and no errors found. I'll give the 2 partition idea a go but it's annoying that others get theirs working with 2TB and mine won't read.

Can't make the partition active, it's greyed out. I'm gonna say the hard drive has issues and give up on this. Thanks for suggestions.

[DigitalVandal]

The drive was formatted to gpt instead of mbr. Once I changed that I was able to make the partition active. It then worked but said the drive was too slow. Guess the caddy is the culprit. So after all that I'm back to square 1. Lol

[bbb_uk]

I'm surprised the drive is slow as they are normally faster than usb flash drives which I have one and works fine at recording.

Can you clarify the power for this drive is taken by an external power source and not via the usb?

Also if you formatted to FAT32 what was size of clusters? I personally would choose the highest clusters which are 32k I believe.

[DigitalVandal]

I'm surprised the drive is slow as they are normally faster than usb flash drives which I have one and works fine at recording.

Can you clarify the power for this drive is taken by an external power source and not via the usb?

Also if you formatted to FAT32 what was size of clusters? I personally would choose the highest clusters which are 32k I believe.

Powered USB2 caddy with Hitachi 3.5" 7200rpm drive. Formatted to 32k although 64k was available. The caddy is old and terrible quality so I'm guessing that's the problem. I'll give it a go with NTFS when I get time as my USB sticks work with NTFS on my box. It was the GPT v MBR which threw me to start with.

[bbb_uk]

I doubt the caddy is the problem.

So long as the HDD is externally powered then reformat to 64k FAT32 as that may make a difference. My bad I thought the highest was 32k. I remember when I formatted my usb flash drive, I had to use the largest cluster size as the default smaller one said it was too slow to record.

If that doesn't work then format to NTFS and try that.

The caddy is generally just the box that the hdd goes into.

[DigitalVandal]

I doubt the caddy is the problem.

So long as the HDD is externally powered then reformat to 64k FAT32 as that may make a difference. My bad I thought the highest was 32k. I remember when I formatted my usb flash drive, I had to use the largest cluster size as the default smaller one said it was too slow to record.

If that doesn't work then format to NTFS and try that.

The caddy is generally just the box that the hdd goes into.

Cheers for the heads up, i'll give that a go.

[DigitalVandal]

That worked wonders, the larger clusters made a massive difference. it's actually usable now.