Hooked up a USB 2 1TB External Hard Drive to a Hopper and . . . nothing
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I trying to remember, but I think the hopper had to change the hard drive and format it for DISH 's purpose: to archive shows. At least it does the first time you attach a new drive to it. Once it does , you can then hit the transfer tile and your shows will show up and you can select the ones you want to transfer , then hit the transfer button and then VIEW tv screen appears and you can watch tv while it transfers the shows. Of course if you attach the wrong kind of external hard drive and it doesn't have it's own power source, it won't work anyway.
From the instructions I read for doing this, when you plug it into power after connecting it to the DVR, there should be a message on the screen asking you if it is ok to format the drive. Did you get that? Keep in mind you will lose anything on the drive if it is not clean.
This EHD was on a 211k before this. After it wasn't recognized by my Hopper, I took it off, reformatted it on my computer (which recognized it) and tried it again on the Hopper . . . no dice.
Mmmmm . . . when I first connected the drive, I didn't have the drive's power on, but it was attached to one of the Hopper's USB ports.
When the receiver came on, there was a "Preparing DVR" line across the bottom of the screen. I thought this was for the Hopper's hard drive, but maybe the Hopper was trying to connect to MY drive -- which would have failed since it wasn't on.
Curious-er & curious-er . . .
Sounds like it was trying to connect to the external hard drive. What kind of external hard drive do you have? Some are not compatible ,especially those that are external hard drive expanders. I use Seagate and others use Western Digital hard drives. I would call DISH and talk to the technical department and tell them what kind of drive you have and let them talk you through it over the phone. IF all else fails ,take it back to the store and get a drive you know works like Seagate or Western digital. You can check on DISH's website and they will tell you what kind of drive that they recommend.
I was able to use a simple 2.5" USB drive by using a powered USB Hub to provide power to the drive.
If you plugged the external drive in without power on, there was probably enough power on the USB connection to energize the interface that the Hopper recognized but then found no disk spinning.
If you plugged the external drive in without power on, there was probably enough power on the USB connection to energize the interface that the Hopper recognized but then found no disk spinning.
The techs essentially said "Wait for an upcoming software update" -- a little vague, but in the meantime they recommended http://www.wdc.com/en/products/products.aspx?id=360
My drive is a Western Digital.
In case you did not know already, when you formatted your drive while attached to your PC, I believe it needs to be formatted in FAT 32 not NTFS. However, I would think that the Hopper would recognize that a drive is attached, regardless of formatting, and thus the message displayed that asks if you want to format the drive (when everything works as it should). If you did not format it in FAT 32... Maybe try that? Also, I could have sworn that I read somewhere that the external drives need to be connected to the Hopper by the eSata connection, not the USB connection. I could be wrong on that one, but I thought I read that either in a manual, on the support section at Dish, or on this board or another satellite board. I have been all over all of the above in the last four weeks researching.
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Navychop....I might stand corrected. 
I say might, because my memory is not as good as it once was, but I swear I saw the formatting as FAT32. Oh well,perhaps I saw it listed for the specialized drive sold as compatible with the dish DVRs on the WD sight and mistakenly thought that was a requirement for the Hopper ED? Same dealio with the eSATA connection? Thanks for the links to the manuals too. I have them, but it never hurts to have more places to find them.
I say might, because my memory is not as good as it once was, but I swear I saw the formatting as FAT32. Oh well,perhaps I saw it listed for the specialized drive sold as compatible with the dish DVRs on the WD sight and mistakenly thought that was a requirement for the Hopper ED? Same dealio with the eSATA connection? Thanks for the links to the manuals too. I have them, but it never hurts to have more places to find them.
I have played with several 1.5TB EHDs on my PC, and I can attest to the fact that they are formatted ext3. There's a dinky partition which is doing I don't know what (account key?), and then there are some number of 500GB partitions that fill out the drive. The DishArc folder (one/partition) holds individual subfolders for each program. The program data stream is encrypted, though the separate little files for the program info are not.
