External H/D with Sony KDL26EX320BU

[southcoastrob]

Hi,

I have a external Buffalo Ministation USB2 500gb external hard drive which I have connected to my TV to use for recoding and playing back movie files.  I regestered the harddrive on the TV which it then formatted ready for use, however now my computer will not recognise this hard drive any more.

Any recommendations?

Cheers

Rob

[Bravia55HX]

Hi,

yes this catches many people out and theres many a thread on here about this, what your tv has done is formatted it in such a way that it renders it useless on other devices, its a rather expensive way just to try out the rather limited recording function of the tv!, your better off with a TiVo box!!

Sony loves upholding copyright and will stop anyone breeching copyrights by limiting the use of your HDD to your tv.

you can try de registering the device from the tv and use disk manager on the pc to delete the offending partition and re format it back to NTFS

[southcoastrob]

Hi,

I have de registered the hard drive on the tv now, but it is still not visible on any computer so I cant re format it. I have tried using disk manger but It is not visible in there either?

rob

[65hx923_cust11 · Accepted solution]

Hi Rob,

I assume that you are using Window OS. Windows is not the most useful OS for these matters. You should be able to use fdisk, partition magic or similar. There are some free like http://www.partitionwizard.com/free-partition-manager.html. Check this Wikipedia page for a big selection. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_disk_partitioning_software

You should also be able to do this via the command line using DISKPART. To do this type in the search box cmd in the list of programs you will see cmd.exe right click and run as administrator, enter the administrator password and then run diskpart. Please be aware that this utility can remove your Window partition and destroy the whole operating system. You can search in the web for information about it. If you are not computer savvy I strongly suggest NOT using it. It will be better to use one of the utilities above. If you use something from the internet then keep in mind that these might not do the job and or might harm the computer.

Another good solution is using a computer running Linux. If you got a friend with a Linux machine ask for a favour :smileywink:. This might be the best solution.

When using a HDD for recording the disk has to be for exclusive use of the TV PVR. You will not be able to play files from that disk even using your TV. You will be able to play your recording exclusively.

Cheers