Replacing Hard Drive Dedicated Micros D4

[DMInstaller 0]

LOL ... guess no one knows

 

No, you came here asking for help but you couldn't answer the few questions I asked you. There is a good chance I can't help you, but if you can't answer the questions - what exactly are you expecting me to do?

[RexLan 0]

LOL ... guess no one knows

 

No, you came here asking for help but you couldn't answer the few questions I asked you. There is a good chance I can't help you, but if you can't answer the questions - what exactly are you expecting me to do?

 

Well ... can you see the photo I attached to my reply post?

I sent you a PM and asked for help. You said to post it here and you would do that. You also indicated that it was easy to swap out the HDD and that is what my question is about.

 

I said that version of the software in the machine is current version of the software (3.1 v.188) in the first post and in the PM So what is your question about that?

 

It is an Dedicated Micro D4 (D4DR)

ID number 00D0D9037A4C

 

I believe I have provided all I have.

[RexLan 0]

LOL ... guess no one knows

 

No, you came here asking for help but you couldn't answer the few questions I asked you. There is a good chance I can't help you, but if you can't answer the questions - what exactly are you expecting me to do?

 

So after two weeks you still don't know ... LOL.

 

Right ... I cam here asking for help two weeks ago and you said you had the answers. Apparently I mis-read that. Thanks anyway.

[bpzle 0]

Mr. DM is kind of a jerk, huh

[rory 0]

Sell it and get something that works?

[RexLan 0]

I should get rid of it but they are pretty expensive and it is just a crummy HDD issue.

 

I bought a new 160 Gb and installed it and then in about a day the video indexing is messed up and it quits. Same with a 320 Gb HDD.

 

If I put one of the old 160's back in and an 80 slave it works fine. So the only issue is that it is looking for a particular HDD .... which is pretty crummy! A shame to have to pay them $400 for a $45 HDD and a real shame that I can not just install (and keep working) and replacement myself.

 

The last thing I wanted to try was connecting with a terminal program and trying to had the D4 itself format the HDD .... but I can't connect to it.

[DMInstaller 0]

LOL ... guess no one knows

 

No, you came here asking for help but you couldn't answer the few questions I asked you. There is a good chance I can't help you, but if you can't answer the questions - what exactly are you expecting me to do?

 

So after two weeks you still don't know ... LOL.

 

Right ... I cam here asking for help two weeks ago and you said you had the answers. Apparently I mis-read that. Thanks anyway.

 

No, I just don't care about your problem anymore. I said there is a good chance I couldn't help you. I wasn't aware that I was obligated in any way to help you, especially when you can't answer the few questions I asked. If you can't take the time to do the research and answer them, why should I spend my time inefficiently troubleshooting your problem?

 

Being the nice person that I am, I'll give you one piece of advice and tell you to rebuild the video index. Beyond that, maybe bpzle can help you, he sure has a lot to say?

[bpzle 0]

Thanks for the reference!

 

I'd love to help here, but I'm afraid I'd be at a loss too with the problems he's describing. Never heard of anything like it and I've got about 10 years in the biz and have worked with countless of makes/ models of DVRs too...

 

Unless you can get some real help with that thing, I'd be happy to quote you some prices on a replacement unit. With any purchase you get a lifetime of free tech support from someone who regularly installs the same equipment. So no more headaches researching and pleas for help on internet forums! No more rants from jerks who admitedly don't care about you or your problems! With my company, you get the technical and customer support you need, when you need it, for free! It's a shame you have not gotten that with your DM unit...

[snate.ini 0]

You can upgrade to a higher capacity HD if you send it in to DM and you can upgrade it in the field if you have computer with a serial cable to run hyper terminal on com port 1.

[Gubins 0]

Hi, I'm new here.

 

I have read this thread and have been working on a DS2A DX16C with the two original 160GB Maxtor drives. It has firmware 3.1 (169). The owner wants me to upgrade it to two 500GB drives since the 160s are playing up, probably from old age. I bought two 500GB WD drives designed for this purpose with 8MB cache etc. Having followed all the instructions I found it would not work and stuck on the boot loader. I had to reformat the old drives as they were causing problems and tried them again from the backup I had made of the main drive. It worked OK. I tried two 250Gb hard drives and they worked OK too.

 

Is there a limit on size? Like maybe 320Gb each drive? I have read where some people have installed 500Gb drives, total 1Tb, and even 750Gb drives, 1.5Tb total in the same model (I think). Can this really be done? Do I need to make any other changes to have larger drives? Any motherboard changes? I hope someone can throw some light on this as the claims for larger drives led me to buy the 500Gb drives. I probably won't get my money back.

[mikerg 0]

Hi,

 

I have a DS2A DX16C-320GB.It has 2 x 160Gb IDE Drives

 

The slave drive has gone down and I am trying to replace it with another 160Gb drive.

Initially I couldn't work out how to format it to FAT32 as the option doesn't exist in XP.

 

I decided to Clone the Master Drive onto the Slave. The trouble with this is that the Full contents of the Master are now on the slave leaving no room for storage..

 

What Folders/Files are needed on the Slave drive if any.

 

I am an IT manager and have never been involved with CCTV before.

 

Thanks in advance

 

Mike

[Gubins 0]

Hi,

 

I have a DS2A DX16C-320GB.It has 2 x 160Gb IDE Drives

 

The slave drive has gone down and I am trying to replace it with another 160Gb drive.

Initially I couldn't work out how to format it to FAT32 as the option doesn't exist in XP.........

......

Mike

 

Hi Mike,

 

I'm no expert on these machines - see gubins above - but I have an IT background too. I have formated in FAT32 for this purpose. There are several sites that have instructions or free small utilities for this job. Once installed in your machine you need to allow it to configure the second drive itself. Here is something that explains all you need to know about changing drives and setting them up.

See Do At Your Own Risk at the bottom of this page -

http://scorpiontheater.com/dm.aspx

 

Formatting FAT32:

A DOS version is -

http://www.online-tech-tips.com/computer-tips/

formatting-external-hard-drive-to-fat-32/

 

A utility is -

http://www.downloadatoz.com/utility_directory/

fat32formatter/

 

There are many other sites with utilities for free but read each carefully to see it does what you want and check each screen as you install to make sure you do not agree to junk mail etc. Just google Format32 and read each site carefully. I use the word "carefully" a lot because I mean it!

Barry (gubins)

Edited February 20, 2011 by Guest

[Cyberprog 0]

I have a DM DS2 DVTX (311) running v1.65 software. I can confirm that this particular unit will take 1TB SATA Drives, but you do need to use StarTech SATA>IDE adapters, some cheap ones I bought off eBlag didn't work.

A simple reformat with fat32formatter on windows 7, copying the firmware update into the drive and it's up and running. Dead easy.

[johnrobin123 0]

This thread was a great find, and so I wanted to add what I could in hopes someone else can benefit.

 

I recently purchased used a DM/DS2AD/600/16. Mobo is a M2IPC2. It was running version 4.5(021) and M2IP 03.1(09.2). Got it for next to nothing and as expected, it wasn't working 100%. A software upgrade to 4.5(064) fixed everything, but I was suspecting the HD's were flakey.

 

Original HD's were Hitachi HDT725032VLAT80's. Following the instructions earlier in this thread, I sucessfully upgraded the unit to two 500GB drives. New drives are Seagate Barracuda 7200.12 ST3500413AS SATA drives with Manhattan model 158282 SATA 300 to IDE converters on them (microcenter.com). I used Fat32formatter to format the drives (only needed to do a quick format), and Snapshot.exe to back up the original master HD to my PC and restore it back onto the new master HD per the directions.

 

Both of the new hard drives with the SATA to IDE converters attached fit with the existing HD mounting brackets without a problem (this was a big concern at first - didn't want to re-drill the mounting plates for more space between the drives).

 

Some notes on my experience doing this:

 

This DVR has a RS232 port on the back, and throughout the process I kept a serial cable and terminal program running so the boot (debug?) processes could be monitored. This box defaults to 38.4k Baud. The initial software upgrade from CD didn't take, and this was readily apparent from watching the boot processes. Repeated it, and no errors. Lesson here was to watch it. I used Procomm Plus, which has a 1500 line scroll buffer. Wouldn't be a bad idea to have this written to a file for later review as 1500 lines filled up quickly.

 

I intially tried using a pair of Western Digital Blue IDE 320GB 8MB cache drives (WD was the only brand 320Gb 8Mb cache IDE drive I could readily get), but no matter what I did, the unit didn't see them. Zip, nada, nothing. Must be something about the DM bios not playing nicely with WD. Watching the boot processes confirmed the unit was ignoring the drives. The Seagate SATAs installed with no problems at all. Please note that the Seagates have 16MB cache. Not sure if the SATA-IDE converter has anything to do with it, but a 8MB cache isn't necessary.

 

After the Seagate drives were installed and running, the unit only reported 792GB of storage (200+GB for the OS? - I don't think so!). The upgrade-from-CD process was performed again, and the "Format all drives" option selected. Unit now reports 928GB of storage (much better).

 

Have an upgrade CD handy before doing this. I also copied all of the most current software files available for this model onto a CD to have everything in one place locally if I needed it.

 

Running Snapshot takes several hours. I was using an IDE to USB converter on the DVR hard drive, backing it up to an external USB hard drive. This was both to take a snapshot of the HD and then again to restore it. No problem though, set it and come back later was the rule here. I tried to copy the files directly without having to use Snapshot, but a couple of the files wouldn't copy for some reason. Blame Windows.

 

StarTech SATA to IDE converters are used earlier in this thread, but I used the Manhattans because I could get them locally. I think any converter that will support drives over 137GB should work.

[Cyberprog 0]

Been playing with my DVR's tonight, and found that the DVTR's don't like 750GB drives. The DVTU I have here works just fine with the 750GB, and the DVTR does see a 320GB IDE that came with the DVTU.

I need to test with a 500Gb unit, but suspect there may be a limit on the DVTR's around this capacity.

[anaseem 0]

Hello

i just bought a used DS2 DX16c-40 GB

i have gone through all the pages and tried vatious ways

the 40 GB primary HDD lost its partition i created the partition formated it with Ridgcorp software into FAT32

but my DS2 is not communicating through the serial port, i tried it with 19200, 8, NONE, 1 setting but i am simply unable to type anything in the Hyperterminal window and i dont have the IP of the system as well

is there any way i could copy the firmware and the files into HDD by attaching it with computer

if yes how should i copy the files and what should be the directory structure

i downloaded the file D4-D4LU

You guys are Awsome and definately you have the solution

 

Despritely need HELP

 

Thanks in Advance

[Cyberprog 0]

Yes, wipe the drive completely and format fat32. Download the firmware from the DM website, and copy the files from the extracted zip file (less the FTP app, you don't need that and the readme) onto the drive. Insert the drive into the machine and it'll unzip and set itself up for you.

 

BTW results from my experimentation. DVTU/DVTX's are happy with >500GB drives, DVTR's can only cope with 500GB drives, and I've not tested one with a pair of 500GB drives yet...

 

Edit: D4-D4DU? that sounds like firmware for a D4, not a DS2.

[iceman84 0]

I had to replace the 80gb hard drive in my digital sprite2 today. I formatted the drive with my desktop setting the file system to fat32. When I installed it into the Sprite2 I get the message Disk Problem - may be wrong FAT. The message also tells me to log in with the monitor to reformat the drive. I connected my laptop via the serial interface to both of the serial interfaces on the sprite2. I get no response from either interface. I may have the wrong serial cable.

 

My question at the moment is where can I get a sprite2 serial cable or the pin out for the interface?

[lunat1k 0]

I have a Sprite 2 320gb Model# DS2A DX16C-320GB

that I need to put the software back onto as my drives died.

 

Does anyone have the correct software or know where I may obtain it from?

 

Model# DS2A DX16C-320GB

 

 

thanks in advance

[dewalty 0]

DS2A DX16 320GB

 

Re posted as did not notice this was a sticky thread

[berourke 0]

I have messed with this for 2 days, trying everything listed in these threads and just noticed by looking at another unit that pin 1 is marked pin 15 - why i can't fathom, but connecting the cable backwards will give you this error message

[core_zero 0]

Some people have mentioned that DS2 units won't recognize/use all HDD's connected. That is true by default but can me overcome very easily.

I have a unit running 4 HDD's, each 2TB, for total of 8TB of video recording space. Since DS2 uses FAT32, and FAT32 is limited to max partition size of 2TB, there is no sense in using drives larger that that!

 

You can check your configuration using web page -> configuration options -> Tools -> System Variables. For 4 HDD's you should have

disk_mask 463(0x1CF)

disk_string "A-D,G-I"

video_disk_mask 204(0xCC)

video_disk_string "C-D,G-H"

 

 

By default DS2 is configured to use 1 HDD more than it came with from the factory. If you need more you need to modify I:\etc\vidcfg.ini

 

For 4 HDD the file should look like:

#---------------------------------------

# Vidcfg.ini file

#---------------------------------------

#

[Partition 1]

path=C:\video

max_blocks=-1

file_size=52428800

disk_offset=16384

#

#---------------------------------------

#

[Partition 2]

path=D:\video

max_blocks=-1

file_size=52428800

disk_offset=16384

#

#---------------------------------------

#

[Partition 5]

path=G:\video

max_blocks=-1

file_size=52428800

disk_offset=16384

#

#---------------------------------------

#

[Partition 6]

path=H:\video

max_blocks=-1

file_size=52428800

disk_offset=16384

#

#---------------------------------------

[pkfonline 0]

Hope it supports upto 300 GB. please check the config.

 

PKF

[Len53Pan 0]

Does anyone have an idea how to fix this ?

[Blake CCTV 3]

When I have tried to use telnet to replace Dm DVR hdds I found that the tx and rx in the serial cable needed to be swopped.