qsomers

ive noticed since I originally posted here that 1 of the cards is a 1240 12ch, one is a 1480 16ch, and one is a 1240 16ch. they are all the same except for a little sticker on one of the IC's at the bottom right corner. They all work fine without any additional power. I noticed they do have a 2 pin pc fan style connector up toward the output plate. what does that ide connector do? Do you hook it to a hard drive or to the motherboard? I don't even know if I have any IDE drives anymore. There is also that same Ide style connector on the back but it has half the amount of pins and is half as wide. I heard originally when I bought them there was a way to bridge cards together to get 24 or 36 channels in 1 pc, is that what these are for?

I bought 3 geo gv-1480 16ch pci cards about 3 or 4 yrs ago after asking people's opinions on here, and they were great. They were in use at a business my family owns, and I did their IT and techy stuff. About year later they signed a contract with some company to handle their IT/PC's, so the cards were removed, and a standalone dvr was installed. I'm looking to get rid of it because it for some reason uses IDE drives even tho its 3yrs old, so Ive installed one of the cards in a newer pc I had (~3ghz core i5, intel chipset) and the software says "Can't Find USB Protection Key" "The device driver may be lost or it has not been installed!" I never needed a usb key, this is being used with wired cameras, not network ip cameras. Is this a windows 7 thing? I did my research, and installed 32 bit. Another thing I notice is it says "PCI Device" in the unknown category in my device manager, but up in the DVR category the 1480 is there. This mobo only has 1 pci slot, so it must be talking about that, right? I know these aren't fake, I bought them from a company that advertised on this board 4 years ago. It's really important I get at least 1 up and running. I notice there is an IDE plug on the top of the card, but I don't think I ever used it before, is there a separate driver for that or another function of the card? The other cards (audio / rs485 / IO) dont even attach to the mobo, they just hang and need power. Any help would be greatly appreciated. edit: I have tried all 3 cards, and that error pops up when I try to open control center with each card, they couldn't all be bad?

thank you very much for this, we have 2 dvr's that may as well have been boat anchors for the past year. We have countless guides and service manuals from the manufacturer that make no sense at all to us, but we were able to follow your post and we now have 2 working dvrs. thanks again!

some of us are just tinkerers, we don't necessarily need a "benefit" to try something out. and from our tinkering we usually end up knowing more about the stuff, and have a better running setup than those who would "never install on an OS that isn't supported" that aside, I think it will be great to have win8. I picked up some 17" lcd touchscreen monitors awhile back off CL for $50 ea, and most of the touchscreen software and drivers out there are 10-15 years old, hopefully windows 8 will bring some better touch drivers and software. if not from microsoft itself, maybe from software or hardware companies making gear to be used with win8. it's nice to only need the monitor for the dvr, this way I am able to put the dvr up on a shelf and just mount one of the touchscreens on the wall by the door in each location. I found the fingerprint scanners for $20 ea online, so to log on (just like a lenovo laptop) you just swipe your finger, and control the dvr from the lcd.

how do you connect an IDE cable to power? I got them to work, apparently "control center" isn't the dvr software. I installed another folder and it put multicam on there, that's where the cameras are. It doesn't look like what I remember, so I'm still not 100% sure if this is the right thing, there isn't a record button, just the motion detect to start recording is all I've found so far. At least I was able to see the cards still work. I'm only going to use 1 so maybe I can barter the other stuff away.

so the software is onboard the camera? I had an instance where a dvr was going off like this sending me txt messages every 5 minutes, I thought it was clouds or something too, turns out it was signal distortion so slight I couldnt see it was setting it off even at the least sensitive level. I pulled a ferrite choke off a wall adapter, put it closer to the dvr end and have had no problems since

I wouldn't count on much from swann. Some of their stuff is rebranded so maybe you could find your dvr under a different make and call them?

check your settings, is it set to get rid of data that's more than a certain amount of time old? If so it may have seen that data wasn't in the period of time and got rid of it. Another idea, some dvr's use a system to organize the footage to make it easier to find and access, such as a calendar where you click a date to go to the footage for that day. If it has a script to organize the footage (the script usually runs at midnight to create another "day file" and activate the date on the calendar so you can click on it) it might not know how to make sense of the files that are so far in the future. If you really need to view the footage, you can see if it's still there by putting the hard drive in a PC or accessing the footage another way, some dvr's let you access the hard drive at root level if you log into it from the same network it's on. I don't know of a way you will be able to have the footage show back up in the user interface of the dvr itself.

dc210 - you really should call, it's usually different for every model. most of the dvr's I've had don't even have the option for a default password, you have to telnet into them and send the code it gives you to the manufacturer

do a low level format. 50% chance your hdd will live on if it's saying it completed a hi lvl format then asking you to format again. that way you can have the partition ignore those couple bad sectors

I dont know the conversion rate, 300$ us? I like using the ipad/iphone app that one is compatible with. You might be able to do better for that much money, considering that one doesnt even have a hdd, so by the time you get it shipped and get a hdd in it you are looking at another $100. The best deals I've found have always been on used stuff. The problem is most people selling that stuff have no idea how to use it, so they are unable to test it. I was satisfied with the hikvision dvr I had, but it looked nothing like that, so who knows if it was even made by the same manufacturer.

If you want to be able to mix cameras in from different DVRs I haven't seen anything. If you don't mind picking 1 dvr then another, I have used a few that let you enter all the info to stay logged into multiple dvrs, then when you want to view cameras from that dvr you just pick which dvr you want to access and it's ready. I'll have to look, the one I have 3 different dvrs on is called iVMS 4000 or something like that.