Upgrading your sky+ hard drive

[reddwarfcrew]

yep windows wont report it correctly at all.

Only real way is to pop it back into the sky box and check out the free space %.... hopefully now the % is far more than it was with the old drive.

[guysteruk]

i done that dude and its showing less space than the original hard drive. but the funny thing was i fdisked and formatted the drive in dos it showed at 475gb in dos once it was finished but as soon windows loaded up it was only showing as 129gb!! i honestly dont know what the hell is going on

[reddwarfcrew]

hmmm, formatting it with fdisk is not a good idea.
What you have done is formatted the drive with NTFS and then used Copy+ which reformats it as XTV. All you need to do was 'initialise' the disk the virgin disk direct in windows. No need for dos or fdisk or creating partions and formatting.... that;s the job of copy+ (ie copy+ is Fdisk in other words).

Hook the drives back up and delete the partion that you formatted and get the drive back to its virgin unformatted, unpartioned state and start again (following the instructions).

I don't mean to sound harsh here, but if you'd followed the instructions on the link I posted you would have been fine as they tell you exactly how to initialise teh disk: Copy+ : The Sky & XTV Disk Copier and it sure don't mention using dos and Fdisk.

[guysteruk]

i tryed to initiliaze the disk from start and it was only coming up at 137gb

[reddwarfcrew]

Okay, but why oh why are you interested in what windows tells you. YOu are formatting the drive for use by a sky box which uses XTV format that windows doesn;t understand.

When you initialise the disk in windows, you haven't formatted a partion so at that stage you wont know what the disk size is. You then perform the copy+ at which point the drive becomes formatted and then windows tries to guess what size it is, but doesn;t get it right as it doesn't understand teh XTV format.

I can help no more. If you cant be bothered to follow the instructions then i'm wasting my time.

So one last go. Follow the copy+ instructions (once you've got the drive back to an unformatted unpartioned state) and then put the drive back into the sky box and see if the free space has increased. DO NOT BOTHER TO LOOK AT WHAT WINDOWS TELLS YOU ABOUT THE DRIVE.

[guysteruk]

the copy+ program shows the drive as 137gb before i have copied programs over and i highlighted a program i had set to record for a hour and it said 5 percent required and the old drive said 4 percent required for the same program

[reddwarfcrew]

okay. So can you confirm the following:

- you connected the old sky+ hdd to the pc and it showed up in copy+ under source
- you connected the new virgin drive and initalised as per instructions and it showed up under destionation as 137Gb
- you then ran copy plus and put the new drive in the sky+ box
- you then checked a prog that you had set to record and it now showed as 5% compared to 4%

If so what was the sky+ box showing as the total free space with a) teh old hdd and b) teh new hdd

Don't look at an individual program.

[guysteruk]

hard is unpartitioned now as in virgin state and has been initalizied and shows as 137gb in destination

[reddwarfcrew]

okay, that covers my first 2 points in the previous post, but not the second 2.

NB - you have got the jumpers on the new drive set to the same position as the old drive?

[reddwarfcrew]

ps as i've also mentioned beforem you are probably better off in t copy+ forums where the experts are. There is plenty of info there if you are prepared to search like i have.

One posting over there is similar to your query:

Copy+ :: View topic - Samsung HA250JC seen as 32GB

http://www.skycopyplus.co.uk/forum/viewtopic.php?t=85