Using PC to transfer movies between hard drives?

[rdstill]

Please let me know if this question has already been addressed in another thread; couldn't find one upon a quick search of the forum.

I have a Dish Network 722 hooked up to an external hard drive. The EHD has recently become full, so I went and bought a new EHD. However, I want to split up the movies currently on the old drive: one for my children's movies/recordings and one with the adult's. As you can imagine, there are dozens upon dozens of movies on the old drive i want to move to the new one. Instead of moving each movie from the old hard drive, to the receiver, then back to the new one, (which will be very time consuming) is there a way to get a PC involved to do the transferring? Such as, hooking up both the old and new hard drive to a PC in to two separate USB ports and simply drag the movies between the drives? Or, will this screw up the hard drive's formatting and cause me to lose recordings? Does this work?

 

[garys]

PC will reformat the HD and you will lose the recordings, you would need to transfer to the receiver, then to the new HD.

 

[mike123abc]

If you have more than one receiver you can do the work in parallel. Transfer some recordings to receiver 1. Then move the EHD to receiver 2 and start transfering more movies. While receiver 2 is busy getting movies off the EHD, connect your new EHD to receiver 1 and start transferring to the EHD. When done switch receivers again and transfer to 1 while unloading receiver 2.

 

[TheKrell]

I haven't done this, but I imagine that if you clone the drive to one of identical size, then you would have a copy of everything on both old and new drives. Then you could just delete the appropriate programs when plugged back into the receiver..

 

[bhawley]

http://www.satelliteguys.us/dish-ne...-how-transfer-recordings-one-ehd-another.html

 

[fredp]

If your drives happen to be WDs then you could also use their free dl program to copy to an even larger HD as discussed here.
ACRONIS

http://www.satelliteguys.us/dish-network-technical-discussions/240220-how-clone-ehd.html

 

[harshness]

Acronis makes several excellent products but none of them that copy discs or files are free.

As should always be pointed out, does it really matter how long it takes? You don't have to babysit it and it all goes on in the background.

 

[jwolf]

Not true, as pointed out in the previous post, there are WD drives that come with software from Acronis. Acronis True Image WD Edition Software is available on the WD support page if you have a WD disk, and it is free.

 

[rdstill]

If your drives happen to be WDs then you could also use their free dl program to copy to an even larger HD as discussed here.

My first EHD was WD but WD has quit manufacturing the "MyBook" line of EHDs, so I had to go with Seagate for the new one.

 

[rdstill]

Acronis makes several excellent products but none of them that copy discs or files are free.

As should always be pointed out, does it really matter how long it takes? You don't have to babysit it and it all goes on in the background.

Some baby sitting would be required. I'd have to move a few recordings at a time to the receiver from the old drive, plug in the new one, the send them back to the new one, then plug back in the old one, move a few more recordings to the receiver, then to the new one, etc, etc, etc... This is what Im trying to avoid, the constant unplugging and plugging in. Keep in mind, my receiver memory has some recordings on it I don't want on a EHD at all, so I don't have the receivers whole memory to work with for transferring.

 

[rdstill]

http://www.satelliteguys.us/dish-ne...-how-transfer-recordings-one-ehd-another.html

Thanks a million for that link, bhawley, but this looks super technical for me. I'd definitely mess that up somewhere along the line. Probably will just use the receiver.

 

[bhawley]

It's not that hard, download Ubuntu and play with it, then give it a whirl. You may find many things about Ubuntu you like besides
copying from drive to drive.

 

[whatchel1]

It's not that hard, download Ubuntu and play with it, then give it a whirl. You may find many things about Ubuntu you like besides
copying from drive to drive.

I like the mint versions of Linux better.

 

[multnomah]

It's not that hard, download Ubuntu and play with it, then give it a whirl. You may find many things about Ubuntu you like besides
copying from drive to drive.

I agree. I did this last summer, with Knoppix instead of Ubuntu: downloaded the OS, wrote it to a CD, booted up in Linux, and copied the directories from the old EHD to the new one. I took it slow, fooled around with it a little, and enjoyed myself. It takes a long time to copy a large directory, but you can let it run overnignt. Then you can delete the kid's movies from one EHD and the adult movies from the other, like TheKrell suggested.

One caveat, however: if you're playing with an unfamiliar OS, disconnect your network connection while it's running until you figure out how the firewall software works.

 

[Pepper]

I haven't done this, but I imagine that if you clone the drive to one of identical size, then you would have a copy of everything on both old and new drives. Then you could just delete the appropriate programs when plugged back into the receiver..

This is by far the easiest way, I have done it a couple of times. Connect both drives to a compatible pc*, boot your favorite cloning program, double and triple check one is source and which is destination, and let it rip. When done, just delete what you don't want from each. Start with the new one to verify it actually works, before deleting anything from the original.

*it's fastest if you can use a native interface instead of USB for the cloning process.

 

[DIRANONI]

Is the limit on EHD for the 211 still 1TB?...so many good deals on the 1.5TB and 2TB

 

[Bobby]

211 is 1TB, the DVRs 2TB...

 

[topcat5]

I agree. I did this last summer, with Knoppix instead of Ubuntu: downloaded the OS, wrote it to a CD, booted up in Linux, and copied the directories from the old EHD to the new one. I took it slow, fooled around with it a little, and enjoyed myself. It takes a long time to copy a large directory, but you can let it run overnignt. Then you can delete the kid's movies from one EHD and the adult movies from the other, like TheKrell suggested.

If you just want to clone the drive then use "dd" if you are booted to linux. You don't even have to mount the drives. An example is "dd if=/dev/sdb of=/dev/sdc" where /dev/sdb is the device location of the input drive and the /dev/sdc is the output drive. (you will need to put the ones specific to your system) Optionally you can add bs=1024 to speed it up some. It will efficiently copy the drives. Don't get the order wrong as it will happily copy the empty drive to the original one.

This method can also be used to wipe a drive with zeros using if=/dev/zero.

 

[TG2]

If you just want to clone the drive then use "dd" if you are booted to linux.

For the graphically predisposed persons.. you could also download a GParted Live cd ... boot from it, and then G-Parted will help you graphically copy from one to the other.. it won't work with partitions that aren't formatted (or didn't use to) ... and in those cases you'd be back to using DD in a command prompt.. My 722k's drive (internal not external) appears to use a non-standard partition for data... from what I've been reading it may be a virtualized file system, so to the naked eye it looks unformated.. but load the right virtual driver and you'd get usable file names and structure.. still looking for more info on it.. as time permits..

 

[topcat5]

This is why you would want to use DD as it doesn't care about partitions, formats, etc. It simply takes the bytes it finds on one drive and copies them exactly to the other drive. Theoretically it should even copy an encrypted drive, though I haven't tried that.