Will this drive work as an expander?

[#1]

It has been an odd history since then.  I did format it as exFAT, no change. In the process of trying to get the PVR to erase the attached drive I wiped the internal one instead.  I left the new drive plugged in anyway and after a day diagnostics was claiming that it has ~2TB available space, and filled in lots of data about it, although it still said No next to "PVR Compatible".  Since I lost all my programs and it has started recording more, the scale showing amount of space used is all the way to the left so not possible to gauge yet whether it really thinks it has 0.5TB or 2.5TB available.

[cdx304]

you do not do the formating the pvr does .You use the esata connector on the back of the pvr .It will never work if you format it .

[cdx304]

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[#4]

You may need to format it to create a partition table, after plugging it back into the PVR, it should see it has having more than 0 space and offer to format it again, making it usable.

[cdx304]

The pvr has to do the format and that's it .I can't believe people have never either replaced the internal hard drive or used an external .On the screen it will ask you to format hit ok and the pvr starts the formating .the hd box does it the gateway will work with multiple expanders .

[#6]

Amazingly, the PVR has not asked me to format this drive. As I said, the diagnostics shows the second drive having ~2TB available space, and displays a large amount of information about the drive, including the word "No" next to "DVR compatible?" I find this quite odd, but that's what it's doing.  Until a lot more shows are recorded I won't be able to tell whether the expander is actually being used for recording shows.

[#7]

cdx304 wrote:

The pvr has to do the format and that's it .I can't believe people have never either replaced the internal hard drive or used an external .On the screen it will ask you to format hit ok and the pvr starts the formating .the hd box does it the gateway will work with multiple expanders .

Yes, but often you need to format it on a computer first before the PVR will prompt to format it.. 

[#8]

If formatting on a W10 PC then, 1st - a brand new disk has to be "initialized" as either a MBR or GPT type partition table.

Then you format it as either NTFS or EXFAT 

So what is the DVR/PVR initiaizing the volume in? .......is it a GPT(GUID partition table) ? or a MBR and thus what format is the harddrive being formatted in after the initialization ?

[art1]

All those expanders are out of date, and can't be bought anymore. Is there not something that will work

[shaw-tony]

@art1 expanders are no longer supported as we are moving to cloud PVR solutions with BlueSky TV. You can find more details here.