Successful upgrade of Sky HD Box

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Successful upgrade of Sky HD Box

Postby John100 » Tue Mar 01, 2011 4:23 pm

Having just upgraded my SKY HD box with a 1TB disc I thought it might encourage anybody nervous of doing the same to share my experience.

About a year ago I was getting the classic random errors on my Thomson Sky HD box. I bought a PSU upgrade kit and all went well.

Although the frequent crashes had gone the box would still freeze and turn itself off occasionally (often when recording two HD channels and simultaneously watching an HD recording). For this reason and the fact that I was often getting close to running out of space I decided to upgrade the disc.

I spent many a happy hour reading the various forums and finally took the plunge today. Very nervous as the boss said that if I lost her Oscar night recordings and umpteen soap opera episodes I would be in real trouble.

I used a Western Digital AV-GP WD10EVDS 1TB drive bought on line for a tad over £50. Not wanting to fork out for USB disc caddies I decided on toughing it out by using my desk top PC. This meant that I had to buy a couple of SATA data leads and a Molex to two SATA power cables. These were sourced from Northern cables via. EBay, total less than a fiver.

On my PC there are four spare SATA sockets and several spare Molex power sockets so it all just plugged together (I had removed the Sky disc by now).

Downloaded and ran Copy+ . This did a quick scan and identified both the old Sky disc and new, uninitialized WD 1TB. Following the on screen instructions I was soon copying over the boss’s programmes (about 70% of the old disc). Whole thing took about an hour and a half. Would have been a bit quicker but I missed omitting some of the unwanted ‘anytime’ recordings.

Stuck the new disc back into the Sky box, powered up with bated breath and hey presto it all worked. The planner has gone from around 30% to 90% free so three times more space on a disc that is very roughly 3 times bigger seems about right. I’m sure this means the box is seeing the whole 1TB.

What’s more fast forward is faster and smoother and the whole thing seems a bit more responsive.

The whole process is made very straightforward thanks to Copy+ which is an excellent bit of software (donation enroute) and all the good info on this forum. Great stuff. My thanks to all.
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Re: Successful upgrade of Sky HD Box

Postby pcbbc » Mon Mar 07, 2011 1:12 pm

Glad everything worked out okay for you - Thanks for the donation!
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