Accessing or erasing an external hard drive attached to a cable digital box?

Question

My cable digital box started acting up yesterday worse than usual and wouldn't turn on for several hours despite a few hard re-boots. Then, when it finally turned on, it would display my recorded shows but wouldn't play any of them. Another few re-boots didn't help and the cable company had no suggestions except to replace the box.

So someone came today and did that. The new digital box recognizes the external hard drive but says I have zero recordings. It's also giving me abnormally low readouts for the amount of space I have left. It should be 3-4 times more.

This has led me to wonder whether the external hard drive is still about 3/4 full - after all why would the recorded shows be erased simply because there's a new digital box - but the new digital box can't read the recordings and is treating the used space as non-existent space.

If that's true, would I be able to see anything if I plug the external hard drive into my laptop and either delete the recorded shows or somehow re-format the drive?

I could try just doing that but I don't want to make a bad situation worse without seeing whether someone has any suggestions.

Answer 1

I don't think you have anything to loose. Plug your external hard disk in and see. The only thing I can think of is that the music was never stored on your local external drive, just a reference to it somewhere else. If the data is really on your external drive, it shouldn't have anything to do with the cable box unless the address of the cable box has changed.



If you knew the IP config of the cable box address, then you could use IP config in the command box (black C: box). Call your cable company and tell them what happened and ask for them to configure the came IP config you had before. Also, check any router and see if your IP config has changed.

Answer 2

That would be the best way to free up the space. My guess the box doesn't see the recordings, because it doesn't know there should be any there. One suggestion before deleting the recordings is to look for a way to have the digital box detect the recordings on another device.

Answer 3

purely run the device fix from the demanding force. that would favor to kill the Virus. it would want to be like once you first offered the pc. Then positioned each and every of the updates decrease back on. I made fix disc earlier. that is purely the drivers. and the different software that got here with the pc contained in the first position. there is no OS on it. move with the first determination that I reported.