DOA Hard Drive
First time I've ever had a hard drive DOA. Was upgrading drives in my home server, as the drives were a bit old and wanted to increase space. Five years ago, said I'll never run out of space, LOL. ...
Forum Discussion
JaxDad wrote:
I’ve dodged the bullet so far, but........ it’s going to happen, soon.
The big issue, and one of if not my biggest P!&% off, is the external drive DVR on my satellite TV service.
Some clever bunch of corporate bean-counters decided that if folks could access the content they’d have a data sharing problem.
Their solution? When you plug a new drive in to the sat. box it formats it in Linux and installs an auto-run program that looks at the S/N of the box, if it doesn’t match it won’t play. It also uses some weird, even for Linux, encryption that means you can’t even duplicate the drive.
So with MANY hours of content we can’t protect it, if the drive dies, it’s gone. It’s already noisy...... tick, tick, tick.
JAX, you need to thank the MPAA (Motion Picture Association), screen writers guild, actors guild for the encrypted DVR drives on sat TV boxes. The decision was not made by the Sat providers but by the movie and TV industry.
If the content is not encrypted (protected) then the Sat companies cannot prove that they were not involved with pirating the content after it is recorded on the DVR drive.
On some of the older Dish receivers, there is a USB port that will allow you to connect an external USB HD that allows you to copy DVR content to the drive. You do have to pay a one time fee for Dish to activate that feature for that unit.
I have not tried that but I do believe if you get a replacement unit (same model) you should be able to plug the USB drive in and it should be able to play the content on that drive. You may need to pay another one time fee for activating the replacement receiver USB port.
External USB drives will be reformatted and the data placed there from the DVR will be encrypted so you can't view or copy content digitally via a computer. But in theory you most likely should be able to view the content of the USB drive on a replacement receiver.
Now, if you were just try to transplant or copy/image the internal receiver DVR drive, yeah, those are "locked" to that receiver SN so transplanting in that case isn't going to work.
