Originally Posted by REPASSAC:
“I suspect that you did not invoke the file manager which is needed to copy a file.
There are windows add-ons that can be used to read unix formatted drives do a seach for "Ext2 EXT3 windows"
To format a drive I would advise you to download a free version of unix to a bootable usb stick then you can format usb drives how you want. you should be able to find full details in a thread describing how to change the HDR's hard disk.”
I have successfully saved SD files to an external USB drive formatted with FAT32, and played them back. I've also done the same with short HD files - usually ones which haven't completed.
I'm still struggling with large files, even though I bought a drive for the purpose. There would be reasons for using such a drive to back off long recordings, or high res recordings which tend to clog up the space available, but may be irreplaceable. I agree that a lot of material can be watched, and the space then reclaimed, but a few of us have noted that it's often the large files which accumulate on the hard drive - possibly also because it's quite easy to watch short ones and reclaim the space, but less so with large files.
I've tried using Live distros running on a PC for Ubuntu and SUSE to format the drive - e.g from mags such as Linux Format - though the whining from the DVD drive is horrendous, but I did get the distros running.
I couldn't figure anything out in SUSE, but in Ubuntu I did manage to format in EXT2 using a simple GUI approach - right click on the device, and then format. The only options appeared to be EXT2 and EXT4 - though maybe I've got an older version of Ubuntu somewhere which might do EXT2 and EXT3. However this (EXT2) does not work with the Humax Foxsat PVR. I revisited Ubuntu using the command line interface in a Terminal window. I tried using gparted, but couldn't get that to work - or at least not for formatting.
In the end I did:
sudo fdisk -l (this simply lists the drives) and partitions so you know which one to use. It didn't work without the "sudo"!
then
mkfs.ext3 -b 4096 /dev/sdb1
At first this didn't work, so I did
umount /dev/sdb1 - looks like mkfs only works on unmounted devices - which are not available as file systems, but the USB system allows them to be detected as storage devices.
Then I repeated
mkfs.ext3 -b 4096 /dev/sdb1
which seems to have formatted the drive. Checking with gparted shows that the sdb1 partition is now in ext3 format, and it is about the right length - approx 500 Gbytes.
However, plugging it into the Humax box - it still doesn't work.
Maybe I needed to do
sudo mkfs.ext3 -b 4096 /dev/sdb1
I assume that 4096 is a reasonable number.
Another approach which I might try is to format using my Buffalo Linkstation - which worked when I wanted to format another drive for backup purposes. So far drawing a blank on this.
I'm guessing the using Ubuntu to format in ext4 won't work either. Maybe there's a finishing step or something else I need to figure out in my approach to doing the mkfs.ext3?
Of course I can't now easily check what can be done with the drive, apart from using the Live distros, as the drive is not now recognisable by Mac OS or Windows. I may have to reformat it again as FAT32 to at least regain use of the device, though I really wanted this one in EXT3 for handling the large files.
Possibly it is a deliberately arcane process.