Issue with External Hard Drive and Moxi DVR

[jbohanon]

I've recently had some problems with the external hard drive that I've hooked up to my Moxi DVR box which I use through Charter. It's a 500GB MyBook Essential Edition, just over a year old.

Earlier this week, any program I tried to view that was saved onto the hard drive was pausing every few seconds when I tried to watch it. I tried disconnecting the drive using the menu option. It froze up when I did that, so I did a manual reset via the button on the front of the box. It rebooted and the drive refused to show up. I tried unplugging it, plugging it back it, turning off the power, and I rebooted the box several times. A few times I would get a message. One of them said that the external drive was not supported by Digeo. Another one gave the message that the drive needed to be formatted to use with Moxi. I plugged in another external drive that I have and it quickly recognized it, so I'm pretty sure it's not the Moxi box. I called Charter and they sent the signal to reset my box and went to bed. In the morning it was working again.

Tonight the same actions started happening again. I think I've come to terms with the fact that I'm going to have to purchase a new HD, but I still have a lot on there that I want to watch. Does anyone have any clue how I can fix this? Is it possible that another overnight wait might start it running again? I'm wondering if the drive is doing some kind of self-diagnostic that takes forever because it's 500GB.

I would run some diagnostics on the drive, but when Moxi formats the drive it makes it so that you can't run the drive in a computer (or even format it) without running a command on a Linux machine.

 

[bigwheel]

I have a similar problem. The older of the two Western Digital My Book drives (500 MB) keeps causing the Moxi to display a message like "the external hard drive has been removed..." or "An external Hard drive has been connected and must be Formatted in order for it to work properly"

When I go into the Moxi's Settings menu and select External Hard Drive it prompts me to format the drive. When I do it within seconds it says the external drive was disconnected improperly.

If I connect the WD hard drive to my PC it says it installed the drivers, etc. properly but when I open My Computer it does not present me with a usable drive. Under the Other Drives section it does display three drives named "Local Disk (I, Local Disk (J and Local Disk (K but each drive displays a "?" on it. When I double click one of these drives it says...
"K:\ refers to a location that is unavailable. It could be on a hard drive on this computer, or on a network. Check to make sure that the disk is properly inserted, or that you are connected to the internet or your network , and then try again. If it still cannot be located, the information might have been moved to a different location"

So... I would love to first figure out if the Hard Drive is the cause (Dead or corrupt). And then I would like to know how to access or format this drive using either my computer (Win2000, XP or Vista) without too much pain.

Any help would be much appreciated.