shortspark,
Some of us are discussing things are truly geek speak. None of what we are talking about has no bearing on people that just want to plug in an external drive and use it. So, as previously mentioned, just ignore the geek speak.
You are spot on in what you think: buy external hard drive, plug it into the 622, follow on screen instructions and call up DISH and activate the feature paying the one time $39.99 fee and voila - it should work.
What we are trying to understand is how the 622 sets up the external hard drive and its structure. It is mostly out of curiousity for us (well, at least for me it is).
I very much understand the divide in the age groups when it comes to technology. My father also just wants things to work (and I don't blame him, so do I). But, more often than not, when something goes wrong, or, he's having difficulty, he calls me up for tech support (for that matter, so does the majority of my family and in-laws - most of which I'm more than happy to provide assistance). On the flip side of the coin, some of the best computing professionals that I have ever had the pleasure of working with are slightly older than you (they were, and still are, in every way, experts in their particular specialities). Since working with them some 10 years ago, I have worked with maybe five people since that are of the same caliber. The point? Those older professionals thought up and invented the fundamentals of pretty much everything we use today and pretty much take for granted. I have found that things in technology that many younger computing professionals think is new actually was thought up by this select group of people back in the 60's, much of which they successfully proved out using computers that make the average of today's low end computers look like supercomputers.
References for you:
- Partitioning
- UUID
- Parted
- DD Dump
In a nutshell: hard drives consist of one or more partitions. Each partition contains a file system. There are many types of file systems. A file system is responsible for the organization of your folders and files. A UUID is simply a unique identifier. Parted (Partimage as you mentioned) is a disk imaging program (think disk backup and restoration). A DD Dump is a Unix (a type of an operating system) that performs low-level data backup and restoration, typically regardless of the underlying device type. A DD Dump is especially useful in computer forensics.
It is my hope that you find some of this explanation at least somewhat useful, as, I firmly believe that it is never too late to learn anything.
By the way: my wife thinks I'm nuts trying to figure this stuff out; she just wants it to work, period.
... I work in IT at a university and really just enjoy this stuff. Most people use windows and anything related to linux sounds extremely geeky. But that's mostly because you don't recognize the names. Just different names for stuff you may already know about in windows. 
