# WD20EARS (2TB 4KB sector) hard drives



## saiyan (Jul 12, 2006)

I have started using two Western Digital WD20EARS 2TB hard drives about a month ago for archiving shows that I do not have time to watch (primarily movies from various free STARZ channels).

These WD20EARS hard drives uses 4K sectors (WD calls it Advanced Format) and they have worked with my VIP722 for about four weeks.

However, one of the hard drives became "unrecognizable" to VIP722 this morning. What is strange is that VIP722 seem to know the hard drive was already formatted by VIP722 because when I connect the hard drive to VIP722 a pop-up is displayed asking me if I would like to manage the hard drive. I remember in the past when I connect a new unformatted HD or a Windows formatted HD, the first thing VIP722 does is offering the option to format USB hard drive.

But when I attempt to manage the hard drive content, VIP722 will display a message saying I need to format the hard drive.

My other WD20EARS hard drive still works with VIP722 though I only have about 100GB of shows archived on it.

The WD20EARS hard drive that is no longer recognized by VIP722 has about 450+ GB of recordings on it. I moved about 35GB of recordings to it last night before going to bed.

I remember someone mentioned VIP722 formats hard drives greater than 500GB using multiple partitions. I wonder if there is any compatibility issues between VIP722 and 2TB 4KB sector drive such that VIP722 will not be able to recognize the content of the hard drive if more than 500 GB of data is archived there.

Does anyone know what can I do if a hard drive becomes unrecognizable to VIP722?

Has anyone used WD20EARS hard drives and have archived more than 500+GB of recordings without any issues?

Thanks.


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## TulsaOK (Feb 24, 2004)

saiyan said:


> Does anyone know what can I do if a hard drive becomes unrecognizable to VIP722?


When it happened to me, I was forced to reformat. Thanks for reminding me of that painful event.


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## saiyan (Jul 12, 2006)

Kent Taylor said:


> When it happened to me, I was forced to reformat. Thanks for reminding me of that painful event.


Do you know what caused a hard drive to become unrecognizable to VIP722?
What hard drive did you have to reformat?


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## Stewart Vernon (Jan 7, 2005)

As an aside...

I don't know that the "Advanced format" 4K sectors business means anything once the Dish receiver re-formats the drive with Linux partitions.


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## TulsaOK (Feb 24, 2004)

saiyan said:


> Do you know what caused a hard drive to become unrecognizable to VIP722?
> What hard drive did you have to reformat?


Western Digital My Book Essential 1Tb.
No idea what caused it.


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## harsh (Jun 15, 2003)

Stewart Vernon said:


> As an aside...
> 
> I don't know that the "Advanced format" 4K sectors business means anything once the Dish receiver re-formats the drive with Linux partitions.


Hard block size is a real issue. It cannot be solved with formatting if the software assumes that sectors are limited to a certain size.

This is similar to the issues surrounding hard drive size limitations. It doesn't seem like there should be any, but overhead expense demands that there are.


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## olds403 (Nov 20, 2007)

I had a drive (1T) do the same thing, I used ubuntu to copy the folders to another dish formatted drive that was empty, reformatted the original drive on my mac and let my 722 reformat after that. I then copied the folders back to the original drive and it has worked fine ever since. Not sure what happened to cause the problem.


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## saiyan (Jul 12, 2006)

"olds403" said:


> I had a drive (1T) do the same thing, I used ubuntu to copy the folders to another dish formatted drive that was empty, reformatted the original drive on my mac and let my 722 reformat after that. I then copied the folders back to the original drive and it has worked fine ever since. Not sure what happened to cause the problem.


So you were able to recover recordings by copying files at file system level to another HD and then back to the original HD?
Damn it. I have already reformatted my HD.


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## P Smith (Jul 25, 2002)

saiyan said:


> So you were able to recover recordings by copying files at file system level to another HD and then back to the original HD?
> Damn it. I have already reformatted my HD.


Try to search for "DishArc".


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