Ds2 Hard Drive - Adding Slave Drive

[SUBS]

I have changed drives before with no problems. Just use good IDE's.

But don't go OTT with the size. If I remember there is a limit.

The fans may need replacing (RS) as they do pack up and so the drives overheat.

On DM machines ? I didnt think you could do it easily with theirs.

[Cyberprog]

Changing drives on DM units is incredibly simple once you've got the hang of it.

Basically you start with an IDE drive (or SATA if you have a Startech or Avtech SATA>IDE Adapter) and a suitable PC to work from.

Add the Drive to the PC as another slave drive (or more likely these days, use a USB adapter to bring it on like a portable hard disk).

Using diskpart from the command prompt, do "list disk" and then "select disk x" where x is the additional drive you've added.

Remove all the partitions from the disk by doing "list partition" and "delete partition x" for each partition.

Now do "create partition primary" and "assign". The new partition will now show up in My Computer with all the available space your drive has.

If you're adding the drive as an additional unit, you can stop here and set the drive as slave on the jumper and connect it up and fire the DVR up. It'll start building the image partition after a few moments once the cameras appear. Don't reboot it during that time.

If you're adding the drive to replace the primary, now you need to identify what your unit is via the boot screen (DVTR, DVTU, DVTX etc.) and download the appropriate firmware zip file from the Dedicated Micros website.

Extract all these files, and copy the "bin" "bootload" and "disk.zip" to the root of the new hard disk. You don't need the ftp or the readme, they're used when upgrading the firmware remotely.

Now set the drive jumper to master and connect it up and fire the DVR up. It'll start building the image partition after a few moments once the cameras appear. Don't reboot it during that time. If you've changed the Slave drive, once the Primary is done, the Slave will also rebuild.

Beware, if you're using big disks this will take a long time. IIRC my 2TB DVTX (using sata > ide adapters) took several hours to build.

[james.wilson]

I have a few (7) old shape ds2 units with dead hard disks. Can i bring them back to life with above?

[Cyberprog]

Yes, of course James. If you drop me a PM, I'll send you a link to the auction for the SATA > IDE Adapters I've been using.

[breff]

Yes James, I've done it as well, as Cyberprog says, it takes a while to rebuild the image partition

[Cyberprog]

I'm not 100% sure on the biggest drive that can be inserted atm, may try some 750GB SATA's on my DVTR's here, but the DVTX units happily took 1TB drives - IIRC DM did a 2TB version towards the end of the run of the DS2's anyway.

[james.wilson]

i have the adaptors needed but never opened up a dm, have always sent em back or pulled them out... hence the few i have. " of them still function so im guessing i can use g4l etc to pull the image off?

[Cyberprog]

If you need to image them I guess, but there's no real need. Just download the FW from DM's site, copy from the zip to the drive, job done.

Not all adapters work BTW, they need to have master/slave jumpers for starters which a lot don't.

[james.wilson]

master slave on the adapter? i thought that was set by cable and or drive jumper?

[Cyberprog]

Yes, on a PC you would normally have Master/Slave detection, and on a standard IDE drive you would have a drive jumper.

However this is a Dedicated Micros DVR, I don't believe they support autoselect, and secondly a SATA drive is designed to be used on a single channel - and therefore is always a master. So the adapter has to do this job.