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Upgrading your Dishplayer's Hard Drive
First and foremost, be very careful while performing these steps. You can mess up your PC's hard drive if you don't follow directions exactly. You do have a backup of all your important files just in case, right? First checkout this page on how to do the physical upgrade (actually taking out the old drive and inserting the new one). Currently (as of 3/7/2001) the WebTV update servers have been down for several weeks, so you cannot just put a new drive in and let it dial out to get the software it needs. You can check the DBSForums to see if WebTV's update servers are back online. Until then, you'll need to follow these instructions to prepare a new drive to be used in your DishPlayer (model 7100 or 7200). Download dpimage.zip which has two image files; blank.dsk which is a blank 40MB file (to write all zeros to the first part of your drive) and virgin.dsk (the first 16MB of a virgin DishPlayer drive). It's about 56MB unzipped, but only slightly over 3MB zipped.
You need to be running Win2k to perform the drive upgrade. Put in your Win2k CD and browse to the SUPPORT\TOOLS directory. Run the SETUP.EXE program. This will install the Support Tools, which includes DiskProbe. Now click your Start button, goto Settings, and Control Panel. Double-click Administrative Tools, then double-click Computer Management. Under Storage, highlight Disk Management. See which drive(s) are listed; you might want to write them down if there's more than one (you can ignore the CDROM drives, you're looking for ones labelled Disk 0, Disk 1, etc.). Most people will only have one drive, and it will be listed as Disk 0. Now shut down the PC, unplug the power cord, and hook-up the drive you want to use in the Dishplayer. Make sure it's set to be read after the other drives. If in doubt, unplug the cable in the Secondary IDE port (also may be labelled IDE2) and plug the new drive in here (your main hard drive should be on the Primary port already, and you shouldn't need any other drives including your CDROM drives connected to do the upgrade). Alternatively, you can set the jumper to Slave and put it on the Secondary IDE port (only do so if you know what you're doing, we don't want any drives conflicting...simply removing all the drives on the second port and hooking up this drive is almost foolproof).
Now boot your PC up. You can go back into the Disk Management screen and double-check to see that the drives are still numbered right. Make a note of what the new drive is listed as (probably Disk 1). If this is a brand-new drive, it may ask if you want Windows to format it. You do not (click No or Cancel). Now the fun part. Click on your Start button, goto Programs, Windows 2000 Support Tools, Tools, then DiskProbe. In the menu bar click Drives, select Physical Drive. You will see a list of drives, probably PhysicalDrive0 and PhysicalDrive1. Double-click the name of the new drive (i.e. if it was listed as Disk 1 in the Disk Management Screen, then it will be PhysicalDrive1), remove the checkmark next to Read Only (only need to do the top one, you can uncheck both if you want to make sure), and click the Set Active button (only one should be active, the other will be grayed out...if both are grayed out then you need to double-click the name of the new drive again until one is not grayed out), then click Ok to get back to the main program. Click the File menu, then select Open File. First open the blank.dsk file. Now, click the Sectors menu, and select Write. In the box that pops up, click the Write it button. Should tell you it successfully wrote the image. Now go back to the File menu and select Open File. This time open the virgin.dsk file. Again click the Sectors menu, select Write, then click the Write it button. Your drive should now be ready. Power down your PC, disconnect the new drive, and hook back your old drives if you need to.
Hook up the new drive to your Dishplayer (make sure it's unplugged first!). Connect all the cables, then plug it back in. Turn it on, and it should walk you through setting it up as though it was the first time (because this image is from a virgin drive, so it thinks it's never been booted up before). Everything should work fine now. After the 3AM download when it gets its new guide, set up all your shows you want recorded (you don't want to do it before the 3AM download, in case the names of the shows in the 7 day guide don't match the inital 48 hour guide).
Enjoy!
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