Transferring from Old Hopper to Hopper with Sling

[efthimios]

Last week Dish installed my new Hopper with Sling. Prior I was on a Hopper (no sling but with an actual Slingbox attached). I downloaded all of my recorded shows/movies off of the old Hopper onto a 1 terabyte WD external harddrive. When I try and upload from the external harddrive to my Hopper with Sling I get an error message at the end of downloading the first show that "...an error occurred while downloading." The Dish tech said that this is happening because my harddrive is not the type with it's own power source/cord. He recommended that I post here to see if there anyone knows what I can do to remedy this issue and get it to work. Any help would be much appreciated. Thank you.

 

[KAB]

The tech was "officially" correct. Dish does not approve USB hard drives. Have you tried watching directly from it? If you can, just leave them there. Some people have had luck using powered USB hubs.

 

[thomasjk]

Best to leave them on the EHD but lack of a powered EHD can still cause issues.

 

[harshness]

You might try a powered hub to cover for the fact that you ignored one of the key EHD specifications.

COMPATIBLE HARD DRIVES.

While most major manufacturers' external hard drives are compatible, keep in mind the following guidelines when purchasing an external hard drive:

When using an external hard drive with a ViP 612, 622, 722, 722k, 922, or Hopper, the drive should be no smaller than 50 GB and no larger than 2 TB.
When using an external hard drive with a ViP 211, 211k, 211z or DISH 411, the drive should be no smaller than 50 GB and no larger than 2 TB.
The external hard drive must have its own power supply.
The external hard drive must support USB 2.0.
The external hard drive must not use flash memory and should only be a single-hard disk drive.

 

[Riah]

Use acronis to clone the drive to one that is officially supported and restore from the cloned drive
That way if anything goes wrong you still the original and have lost nothing by trying
This is how I moved from 2 h2k's to 2 hws. I was lucky and had no issues restoring from the cloned drives but it was worth the extra effort just in case
Just an FYI if any drive in you system is a real western digital drive you can use the free acronis version on the WD site