EHD Problems

[kstile]

I have a Seagate Freeagent EHD that has been working fine. As has been posted in other threads, this drive spins down and the 622 doesn't recognize it. My solution to this (as I use it very infrequently) has been to just unplug the USB and then plug it back in. So far, so good - this has always worked.

When I tried it tonight (after not having done so for a while, admittedly), the 622 just fails to recognize it: no multimedia device attached. Of course I want the shows that are on it, but even if I wanted to format it, I'm never given that choice.

I tried plugging it into my other receiver (a 612) and it was recognized right away. Of course it told me something that I had no idea about - you can't move EHDs from different model VIP receivers - if I wanted to use it on the 612, I would have had to reformat it. Needless to say, I didn't take that option .

I tried both the front and back USB port on the 622, and all sorts of power cycling.

Any thoughts on how I could possibly get this back on the 622? I tried chat with dish and they were way less than helpful: one CSR bailed with the "we don't provide tech support - call Seagate" and the other said "plug it into your computer and reformat."

Any suggestions?

 

[Bob Haller]

call E for a rehit of the EHD activation code

 

[gdarwin]

<snip>

I tried plugging it into my other receiver (a 612) and it was recognized right away. Of course it told me something that I had no idea about - you can't move EHDs from different model VIP receivers - if I wanted to use it on the 612, I would have had to reformat it. Needless to say, I didn't take that option .
<snip>

I have 4 FreeAgents that I swap between all my DVRs. No problems.

 

[Tony S]

I had a Seagate EHD and I had the same problem. The Seagate drive would go into sleep mode and my 722 would not recognize it. The only way I could get it to work again was by doing exactly what you have been doing...reset the 722, unplug the USB cable from the receiver, unplug power from the Seagate, apply power to the Seagate, then plug the USB cable back in. Sometimes it would work on the 1st try; at other times I would have to keep power cycling the EHD and plug/unplug the usb cable until the receiver would finally recognize it. Sometimes I had to do this many many times before it would work.

I finally got sick of doing this and bought a Western Digital EHD. No problems whatsoever with the WD EHD. This is the drive I bought:
Newegg.com - Western Digital Elements 1TB USB 2.0 Desktop External Hard Drive WDBAAU0010HBK-NESN

As you may know, there is a Seagate utility that you can use to turn off sleep mode in the Seagate drive, but the utility would not work with the maxtor drive enclosure that I had. If you can use the Seagate utility with your EHD that might solve the problem. If not, just buy a WD EHD and avoid the hassle.

You should be able to move your EHD to another receiver in the same house. If your 612 tells you to format the drive, try Bob Haller's suggestion and call E for a rehit of the EHD activation code on your 612. You can check your household key by looking in the setup menu. Select Menu-6-3, then Counters. Use the Page-Down key to scroll thru the counter values until the household key is displayed.

 

[Juan]

uhh anybody try to log into the drive and disable sleep mode?

 

[dwarren2]

uhh anybody try to log into the drive and disable sleep mode?

I had a similar problem with a Maxtor drive. Had to unplug it to access it. Tried attachingit to my computer to see if I could use the utility to prevent it going into sleep mode. Could not. Ince it's been formatted as a EHD for Dish, it looks like a computer can't access it.

I wound up getting a Toshiba drive and it works fine and does not go into sleep mode.

 

[gdarwin]

uhh anybody try to log into the drive and disable sleep mode?

Did it to all of my drives. No problems.

 

[Tony S]

uhh anybody try to log into the drive and disable sleep mode?

uhh, I already said that in the post just before this one (Post #4).

 

[kstile]

Thanks for all the suggestions - I'm on vacation now but will give them a try when I return - especially the "re-hit" to the 612 so that I can at least access the files on that receiver. Thx.

 

[AriesGodofWar]

Did it to all of my drives. No problems.

Me too, went into Seagate Drive Manager Utility and it took me all of about 30 seconds. You can do this after it has been formatted as the changes that are made are not made to the file tables of the drive, which are what is formatted.

 

[JrC]

I have set the sleep mode on my Seagate FreeAgent Pro to something like 4 hours. I shut it off after using it.

However, I noticed the other day that the device was on. Someone turned it on to watch something. Since it was on I tried accessing a program. The device spun up and every thing was OK. I have also copied events to and from the disk.

Did the Echostar engineers fix this?

 

[kstile]

I had a CSR "re-hit" both the 612 and the 622 and the drive is showing up on the 612 and working just great. However, I still have nothing on the 622 ("No device connected.") Since the EHD is working just fine on the 612, I'm afraid that something's screwy with the 622's ability to read it (bad USB bus? - I tried both the front and back ports...). My next troubleshooting step is to try a completely different had drive on the 622 and see if it recognizes that...

 

[Huddles1]

Hi all. I'm having a similar EHD problem with my VIP722k. When I try to transfer files to my EHD (Seagate FreeAgent 750GB - with sleep mode turned off), the receiver locks up. Anyone have any idea what's causing it or how to fix it?
It worked fine when I first signed up for the service, but a day later started freezing up.
TIA

 

[dwarren2]

Hi all. I'm having a similar EHD problem with my VIP722k. When I try to transfer files to my EHD (Seagate FreeAgent 750GB - with sleep mode turned off), the receiver locks up. Anyone have any idea what's causing it or how to fix it?
It worked fine when I first signed up for the service, but a day later started freezing up.
TIA

Try unplugging the usb from the EHD. Wait for the message and clear it. Then plug the usb back in. I have to do that with one of my HD's. The other one works all the time.