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I just so happened to have a 2,200 uF 10V electrolytic capacitor left over from all the Samsung LCD monitor failures from a few years back. I removed the swollen cap, soldered in the new one, and I appear to have a good ViP211 again!

Of course, I need to connect it to the satellite feed so it can verify its connection so I can go in and pull off the Timers. I try to access the timers and it's telling me that it can't do that.

I was able to watch a program I had recorded on an EHD, though. I can't tune in OTA without a satellite signal, either.

Scott Greczkowski you ok with this, as it's not really the intention of comin here to sale but to help each other out???

Foxbat said:

I can't tune in OTA without a satellite signal, either.

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This is why I'm a Pack-Rat. I pulled my Dish 300 w/Dish Pro Single LNBf upstairs to the guest bedroom (since it faces East) and set the dish on the hip roof, aiming to the SE. I was able to pull in a signal in the 50s by hand, propping the Dish 300 between the roof and the house siding, keeping it stable by the angle of my hand.

Of course, I couldn't do much with this other than verify reception and my non-DVR timers (switch to a channel at a given time) since I didn't drag the EHD to this location. I need to set this up with the EHD so I can pull the list of programs I want to record.

I realize I'm on borrowed time, though, as I'm not sure what happens when my receiver gets the Deauthorization Hit. Do I lose my ability to access my EHD and the timers? I guess I need to work fast!

ChadT41 said:

Scott Greczkowski you ok with this, as it's not really the intention of comin here to sale but to help each other out???

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If I want to sell this, I will go into the Pub Sales area. It was not my intention to look for buyers, more for an opinion as to whether people thought it might sell, given the particular history of my receiver.

Foxbat said:

I realize I'm on borrowed time, though, as I'm not sure what happens when my receiver gets the Deauthorization Hit. Do I lose my ability to access my EHD and the timers? I guess I need to work fast!

Click to expand...

If your receiver gets deauthorized, you can call Dish to reactivate it long enough to check what you wanted to check, then call Dish back to deactivate it. Dish allows you to activate / deactivate purchased receivers as often as you like, without charging any kind of Change of Service fee.

Here's an update to my ViP 211k and my update to the hard drive: After thinking I had a DoA drive, I realize that the problem was none of my USB adapters would support the 2TB size. I ended up with a SiiG USB 3.0 enclosure that arrived this week. The drive spun up (yay!)(finally!) and better yet, my 211k said it liked it and shut down to format the drive.

On the other side of the reboot, my 211k shows almost 198 hours of HD recording time! Now for the acid test, transferring the contents of the old EHD over to the newly formatted 2TB EHD.

The transfer went way faster than the last time I tried this. I think taking the drives out of the USB enclosures and mounting them in the Mac Pro's internal SATA bus might have something to do with that, well, and the Ubuntu vs. KNOPPIX factor, too.

In a nutshell, there are three partitions on the ViP 211 EHD. The first is 2 GB Linux ext3 named some long string of hexadecimal characters, the second is a smaller Linux Swap partition, and the rest of the drive's capacity is ext3 formatted named "EHD". This is different from the 622/722 (and I'm assuming the Hoppers) where the capacity of the drive is broken into 512 GB ext3 partitions. This makes moving content a lot easier since you don't need to switch partitions,

I mounted the first partitions of the old drive and the new drive and copied the catalog files and the pvr log files. I did not bother with the nightly log files or crash logs. I used the default Terminal program and the "sudo cp --preserve=all {source} {destination}" command to perform the copy as root. With the actual programming, there are three files associated with each event, named something like "esnnnn" (where nnnn is a zero-filled number). This took the bulk of the time. The esnnnn.bm file contains the Information about the event and is fairly small (under 10 KB) while the esnnnn.ts file is most likely the video stream (multi-GB size). I'm not sure what the last file could be as it is a variable number of MB in size.

So that was pretty simple. I connected the new drive to the ViP 211k, let it be recognized, rebooted, and after the usual satellite acquisition (the program guide was recognized from before and didn't need to be updated) I had all of my previously recorded program events! Yay!

So now I have almost 148 hours of HD capacity for my ViP 211k (almost 600 hours of SD room). I doubt Dish will ever expand the capacity of the 211/211k/411 past the current 2 TB upper limit, so I won't ever need to do this again.

I need to do something about the SiiG enclosure's LED, though. It is very bright blue and I can see it blinking behind the TV stand with the lights on. I can only imagine it with the lights turned off.