buckethead

The unit is not under warranty as it is about four or five years old and purchased on eBay. A single 300 or 320 gig hard drive does sound appealing and I might be able to copy the data from the master before it too gives up the ghost. I tried contacting GE Kalatel for technical support to see if they might suggest some compatible drives, but because I am not a dealer or distributor, only a lowly "end user", they were unwilling to offer help. Thanks for your helpful suggestions !!

The slave harddrive on my kalatel dvr has decided to go on strike and stop spinning. The originals drives are Maxtor Diamondmax 16, 160gb, 5400 rpm, 2 mg cache. Because of their age, these are difficult to find. Will any 160gb, 5400 rpm ide drive suffice as a replacement ? The master is still working, so I haven't loss functionality, only capacity...

Eventually, I will have about four or five cameras connected, but while testing, I had only a single camera hooked up and still couldn't get more than 30pps be it timelapse, event or global. Very strange ...

Two new questions : 1) The manual says that 60 pps can be used. When going through the setup, the highest rate seems to be 30 pps. What gives ? 2) Will I be shortening the life of the harddrives if I only run them for say 12 hours a day, ie. power up in the am and power down in the pm ? Will this power cycling save or wear down the drives faster ? Thanks !!

Wow, you guys are terrific. Seanmort : As you suggested, the power supply is indeed an N60. I will see if GE will replace it. After hours of sweat, spittle and cursing, I managed to get the unit to boot up (initially with the slave drive disconnected and later connected). The boot process took 20 minutes. I timed it with a stopwatch. At that point, I went into Disk Maintenance and used the Destroy command. From that point on, the unit has worked perfectly. Does the Destroy command do defragmentation as well as video file purging ? Or was this simply a coincidence ? Once again, my humblest thanks to one and all ...

Rory, The version shown during the boot is 4.09. I live in the U.S. and the date stamped on the two Maxtor drives inside is 04NOV2002. From testing last night, here are my observations : 1) On the original setup, the front drive is the master and the rear drive is the slave (set to cs enabled). Result : constant rebooting. 2) Front drive set to master, rear drive disconnected. Result : constant rebooting. 3) Rear drive set to master, front drive disconnected. Result : "Error : no hard disk found:. 4) Rear drive set to master, front drive set to slave. Result : "Error : no hard disk found". From all this, it seems that the front drive is faulty and/or corrupted. Also, I downloaded the operators maunual off the web and was wondering, is there a proper shutdown/powerdown procedure ? It seems odd with any hard drive based system to simply pull out the power cord to turn it off. I hate to chew up so much of your time on this, but getting this right the first time will save lots of headaches down the road. Thanks again !

Thanks for the feedback, Rory. This now brings up several questions : 1) Can any off the shelf 160 gig hdd be used ? The unit currently has two 160 gig Maxtors. 2) Is special formatting needed ? 3) Is there proprietary software on the hdd ? 4) Will the unit run permanently with only one hdd ? Oh boy, this will be a learning experience ...

I recently purchased a used Kalatel DVMRe-16ezt and it goes into a boot loop from which there is no escape. It's running 4.09 software and the drives make a lot more noise than I expected. This is my first dvr and I was used to the quiet operation of Panasonic dvd recorders which are hard drive based. Is this indicative of hard drives which are ready to keel over, or am I overlooking something more basic ?