Look what I found!

[hansolo77]

So I was taking out some trash to our dumpster out front, and found somebody had thrown away what looks like a brand new Dish Network kit. It had the box, full of Styrofoam and what not. Then thrown on top of that was the dish itself, and then tossed beside it was the DVR. I didn't bother with the other stuff, but I went ahead and grabbed that DVR. Once safely inside my home I looked at it better. It's a Hopper model with Sling. It still has the protective clear plastic on the front, and inside the door the Smart Card was still in the slot! At first I was thinking of taking it apart and salvaging the hard drive, but then I got to thinking... can I use this possibly as a media client or something? Since it has Sling, maybe? I didn't see a remote though, so I'd have to figure something out with the Universal. What do you guys think?

[hansolo77]

Checked "under the hood", it has a 2tb hard drive! Who would just chuck this in the trash?!

[Adultery]

I strip them of hdds and chuck them every time I upgrade.

I use DirecTV but it's pretty much the same deal.

[hansolo77]

That's probably what I'm going to end up doing. I tried searching for a way to hack it to allow me to install Linux or something but it doesn't look like anybody's bothered to come up with a way or reason to do that. Kinda bummed, it would have been nice to set up a streaming media client that wouldn't require my huge computer to be powered on all the time. Oh well. Still, a heck of a good deal on a 2tb drive!

[hansolo77]

So I took the drive out and plugged it into my computer. Wouldn't you know? The drive wouldn't power on! ARGH! I did some research, and found this:

http://www.wikihow.com/Reformat-and-Use-a-Dish-Network-DVR-Hard-Drive-with-HDPARM-Tool

Turns out the drive is programed to boot up in standby mode and then are "woken up" from the DVR, which standard computer controllers aren't made to do. So I had to use this utility called HDPRAM to reprogram the APM feature on the drive so it would work. Pretty sneaky. Glad I found that, I was about to be really pissed lol!

[tthurman]

Some free storage, wow!

One man's junk is another's treasure, great score dude!

[hansolo77]

Yeah I hit another little hurdle today with it. I repartitioned the drive outright, not even bothering to look at the files (kinda wish I did, would have been educational/interesting). I created the drive with 1 partition and gave it drive letter Z so I could easily find it when I plugged it into my 14-drive server. Unfortunately, it wasn't being detected (gulp!). I played the disconnect/reconnect game a few times, then hooked it back into the other computer and it found it right away. Turns out, my server has a drive not of the storage pool that I have designated Z for torrenting, and it never occurred to me that my new drive was using the same letter. I ended up just clearing out all the partitions, then connected it to the server. Windows Home Server console picked it right up and quickly re-partitioned it and added it to the storage pool. I now have 14 drives, totalling 12TB of space. Of course, it's really only 6TB because folder duplication on everything essentially cuts it in half. But with faulty drives not lasting long, it has definitely been worth it!

This discovery couldn't have come at a better time either! One of my drives in the last week has been throwing up lots of CRC errors, and HD Sentinel has been reporting +68 sectors reallocated here, then +152 there, and then today it was up around +368. It was already on it's last legs when I installed it a month ago. I needed some temporary storage and hoped the drive would last long enough for me to move some large files around. It did, served it's purpose, and is now replaced.

HD Sentinel reports that this drive has only been completely power cycled like 6 times since it was manufactured, and has only had a power-on time of like 125 days. Some of my server drives are reaching +2000 power-on days lol. Pretty nice. I ran a chkdsk surface scan on it just to be sure it wasn't bad from being tossed in the dumpster and it came back 100%! I'm happy about that. Now I'm hoping more people are dummies and throw more of them away!