# New Hard Drive for 942



## scn101 (Jul 11, 2005)

Since ripping into my 942 a while back that ultimately led me to replace a blown 7812 regulator that was causing my fan to run all the time and my remote to act flakey I thought I'd try my luck at getting a back up hard drive. I figured that since the hard drive seems to run 24x7 it is going to fail sometime. The original drive was a Western Digital SATA drive. I ended up finding a Maxtor 7y250m0 online for $60. Simply pulled out the old drive and put in the Maxtor drive. The 942 booted and gave a hard drive corruption warning asking to reformat the drive. Hit "ok" and the 942 reformatted the drive and came up like new. Tested out just fine.

I put the old drive back in and it rebooted fine with no loss of recordings.

Keeping the Maxtor drive as a spare.

One nice thing too is that this Maxtor drive is also listed as an approved drive for the 622. If I ever upgrade to the 622, I'll have a spare for it too.


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## CABill (Mar 20, 2005)

It was over a year ago that I was reading posts from someone that had an external drive housing to make it easy to swap his drives. $60 is low enough to get me interested. I see that price at a santechusa site. Could you post where you got yours?

Also - this 7y250m0 model isn't noisy is it?


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## scn101 (Jul 11, 2005)

Santech is where I bought my drive. The purchase went very smoothly.

The Maxtor drive seemed to be just as quiet as the WD.


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## CABill (Mar 20, 2005)

Thanks - I just ordered one.


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## Jon Spackman (Feb 7, 2005)

Interesting. I must say that opening up you 942 voids the warranty, blah, blah. but sounds cool that you found a way to get it back if the drive fails. $60 is pretty cheap and will get it back alive.


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## CABill (Mar 20, 2005)

Good new:
Drive arrived quickly. No problem installing it and getting an empty 25 HD hours, or going back to the original drive. Just as scn101 described.

Bad news:
I guess I expected the drive to come with a SATA cable - all the other's I've purchased have (but they were "retail box"). I don't want to touch the seal on the existing drive, but rather take SATA outside. I had a spare SATA data and power cable, but the power is the regular 4 connector molex you'd see in a PC. 942 has an odd 5 connector with no wire in the 5th, so I had to use its 2" power connector. I guess I'll need to purchase a SATA to eSATA and external enclosure with its own power and fan.

Worst News:
Should have been obvious if I thought about it, but with the empty drive, there were 80 missing Timers. I didn't use the new drive for long as recordings were going to start soon. I'll need to write down the existing Timers to recreate on the new drive when I have more time.


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## P Smith (Jul 25, 2002)

I would connect both to Linux PC and copy files from first two partitions, then 942 should make cleanup new disk by itself


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## gsartori (Jul 13, 2004)

scn101 said:


> The 942 booted and gave a hard drive corruption warning asking to reformat the drive. Hit "ok" and the 942 reformatted the drive and came up like new. Tested out just fine.


How about a bigger HD, 500G or even 750G? Would they work?


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## kspeters (Aug 12, 2003)

P Smith said:


> I would connect both to Linux PC and copy files from first two partitions, then 942 should make cleanup new disk by itself


Care to write a small tutorial on how to do this for us non linux users?


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## wrzwaldo (Jan 23, 2006)

P Smith said:


> I would connect both to Linux PC and copy files from first two partitions, then 942 should make cleanup new disk by itself


I wonder if connecting both drives to a Linksys NSLU2 would work also? Then you could map the drives in windows and move the files that way. Looks like I have some testing to do.


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## P Smith (Jul 25, 2002)

kspeters said:


> Care to write a small tutorial on how to do this for us non linux users?


After few months of thinking  I recall Ghost could copy EXT2 or EXT3 partitions just fine; so you don't need any OS - use Ghost boot floppy or CD ( yeah, I know it will boot MS-DOS ).


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