Copying & Backing-Up a Sky Hard Drive

[dartiss]

You've probably heard of people who upgrade their Sky box with a new, bigger, hard drive, and thought about upgrading yourself. But you always have too many cherished or unwatched recordings in your planner that you don't want to lose?

And what happens to all those recordings if your hard disk was to one day just die on you?

The solution is simple. Copy+ is a free piece of software that lets you do just this - copy existing programmes to a new hard drive or back them up to your PC.

In fact, if you want to upgrade your drive and DON'T want to keep your recording then you may still need to use Copy! Why? Well, if you're planning on putting in a 750 GB or bigger drive then, due a bug in the Sky software, it won't recognise the full amount of space - only using Copy+ will make the full drive space available!

Sadly whichever you want to do, it involves removing the hard drive from your Sky box (those USB ports are, unfortunately, non functional).

Here's what you do...

1. Remove your hard drive from your Sky box (beware - this WILL invalidate your warranty!). There are a couple of great sites which will guide you through this process, as well as which hard drive to choose if you're upgrading - for example, Morlocks or Bevstar
2. Connect this to your PC - you'll need to connect this up internally or via an external drive caddy. It's recommended to use external caddies for problem free operation.
3. Now download and install Copy+ from their website
4. If you're simply backing up your hard drive them Copy+ should recognise your Sky drive and let you save it onto your PC for restoration later, if necessary
5. If you're copying to a new hard drive then you can either connect up your new drive to your PC at the same time (and copy between the two drives) or copy the existing drive onto your PC (using Copy+, naturally) and then connect your new drive and then restore the backup onto it.
6. Stick the hard drive back into the Sky box... voila!

Now, if you're copying to a new hard drive, you're probably wondering why you need Copy+ and can't use something such as Norton Ghost. The reason is simple - Norton Ghost does not understand the special disk format used by Sky and therefore cannot correctly resize partitions when copying to a different size drive.

You might have noticed that I've not gone into a great amount of detail, particularly with regard to Copy+. This is simply because there's a lot more help and assistance on the Copy+ site, where you can find the most up to date details. The Copy+ site has it's own forum if you get stuck and full instructions, hints and tips.

David.

[reddwarfcrew]

Full info and links are in my sig and there is a nice stick in the forums already wioth a load of info.

Upgrading your sky+ hard drive

SkyCopyPlus is also a SkyUser partner and a link is on the left hand side of the forums.

[NewsreadeR]

Closed thread in favour of the original post by reddwarfcrew

Upgrading your sky+ hard drive