Youview hard drive upgrade

[cartoony]

Has anybody upgraded the 500gb drive to a 1tb drive in a DTRT2100 such that the recordings on the old drive are successfully transferred to the new one?

I think I know how to do it but it would be useful if anyone has done it already. 

[TimCurtis]

@cartoony 

Yes you could upgrade the drive from 500GB to 1TB but I wouldn't think there was any chance of transferring your recordings. As soon as the box was booted with the new drive it would reformat it and after that if you tried to copy over recordings the index structure on the drive is so complicated that unless you had in-depth knowledge of it there's no realistic chance of success.

It is possible however to extract SD recordings from the old drive and convert them into a viewable format for replay on devices with USB connections like a smart TV.

[cartoony]

I was thinking more of cloning the drive & extending the partitions, rather than installing a virgin disk & copying the files from one disk to the other

[cartoony]

@TimCurtis 

I was thinking more of cloning the drive & extending the partitions, rather than installing a virgin disk & copying the files from one disk to the other

[TimCurtis]

@cartoony 

Give it a try but it's a Linux format and I'd suspect that there will be index files that would need adjusting for the increased partition size , location of folders etc.

My guess is that whatever you do the box will reformat the drive, but nothing to lose by trying.

[Paul608085]

I upgraded the drive in mine a while back to 2TB. I didn't have any recordings to transfer, so I just put the new drive in, powered up and entered Maintenance Mode. I selected to option to wipe recordings, because there weren't any on the new drive. When I put the new 2TB drive back in a computer I could see that the new "recordings" partition was now approx 1.9TB and all the other partitions matched the originals. Put the 2TB drive back in the STB and all has worked perfectly since. This also worked for the UHD box.

If you wanted to copy recordings to the new drive, I guess you could try connecting both the drives to a PC, (after formatting the new one as above), and seeing if you can just copy them across?

I use Linux as my desktop operating system, so the partition formats were not an issue for me. If you use Windows or Mac etc, you could try downloading "Partition Magic" - it used to be free, not sure if it still is. Burn this to make a bootable CD, (USB stick?), and boot the PC in to it with both drives already connected. This gives various options for copying and cloning etc.

Paul

[cartoony]

@Paul608085 

Thanks for the reply

Putting a new virgin drive in is easy - it's the recordings that are the problem

My understanding is that all recordings other than those from SD Freeview channels are encrypted, so simply copying them isn't an option but I will look once I mount the sda7 (or 8, I can't remember) xfs partition on a Linux machine.

I don't think Partition Magic recognises linux partitions or xfs logical drives

[cartoony]

Sorted

Old 500GB HDD - 49% free, 4 pages of recordings
New 1TB HDD - 77% free, 4 pages of recordings.
Have played back old recording on the new drive from BBC 1HD, History HD, BT Sport HD, all seem fine.
I have written instructions but not sure I can post them here.
Happy Christmas.

[TimCurtis]

@cartoony 

That's excellent news to hear. Have you tried recording and setting schedules?

Copy & paste should work , shouldn't it. Or some photos of the text maybe.

I for one will keep that information & share with anyone else who needs it

[Mallett94]

I have been wanting to purchase either a new 1TB or 2TB HDD for my parents' Jan 2017 T4000 box which has a dead HDD inside it. I have struggled with trying to decide which HDDs would be appropriate for it seen as I have read various things saying it needs to be a specific A/V optimised drive?

Thanks in advance.