Ext. Hard drive trouble

[Bonehead89]

Hi,
I ordered an external hard drive and it arrived today, a 750GB portable Intenso drive from amazon, plugged it into my F5S box via the usb at the back but it isn't recognising it? Any ideas? The power light on the hard drive comes on when I plug it in but if I go into the USB section on the menus the majority of the options are greyed out as it is with nothing plugged in. Cheers for any help

[Nobby Nutz]

Hi,
I ordered an external hard drive and it arrived today, a 750GB portable Intenso drive from amazon, plugged it into my F5S box via the usb at the back but it isn't recognising it? Any ideas? The power light on the hard drive comes on when I plug it in but if I go into the USB section on the menus the majority of the options are greyed out as it is with nothing plugged in. Cheers for any help

Believe it needs formatting to FAT32.

[Bonehead89]

I'll give that a go, any software you recommend? I tried the standard windows format but it never gave me the option of FAT32

[Nobby Nutz]

Hi see this thread might give you a few pointers.

http://www.digital-kaos.co.uk/forums/f184/external-hard-drive-recording-issue-f5s-399281/

[DigitalVandal]

I found my drive worked in NTFS too. Most important thing is make sure it's set to MBR and the partition is active. If you use FAT32 make sure you set it to 65k cluster size. huge difference in HDD drive speed.

[bbb_uk]

I have read on this forum some people having issues with NTFS which at first worked but then started to misbehave.

My recommendation would be to ensure it is partitioned using MBR (Master Boot Record) and set as main/active rather than GPT (GUID Partition Table) and formatted as FAT32 using 64k cluser size as mentioned by digitalvandal.

Some drives maybe factory partitioned to GPT as it's the relatively new standard but Skyboxes must still use the old standard which has been around since '80s.

[Bonehead89]

Cheers guys, I'll have a little google cause a lot of that's gone straight over my head as I've never done anything like this before. I'll have a look online how to do what has been suggested

[autocargo]

Did you try ''disk management'' from your OS? I thing HDD needs to be initialized first...

[bbb_uk]

Yes try partition manager from within Windows (type "partition" in the run command box).

See this from microsoft.

[Bonehead89]

I've tried to create a partition using disk management but the shrink and expand volume options are greyed out so I'm back to square one

[bbb_uk]

See this to convert between MBR and GPT.

Remember to use MBR so if option within partition manager reads something along lines of "Convert to GPT" then it must already be a MBR partition.

[Bonehead89]

Ok thanks, I've managed to create a partition so now got the hard drive set up as two 375gb sections, so now I think I just need to format one to FAT32?

[DigitalVandal]

Ext. Hard drive trouble

My 1tb drive has 1 partition and working very well. It's MBR formatted to FAT32 with 65k clusters and partition set to active.