HDHomerun Flex not recognizing USB storage device

[Lupie4life]

I just purchased m 1st HDHomerun FLEX and a WD Elements 6TB hard drive. The HDHomerun is working & recording to its onboard storage, but does not recognize the attached hard drive. What do I need to do for it to find the hard drive & record to it?

[signcarver]

Does such drive have its own power supply? (There are some older 6TB elements that are full size that will but I dont think the smaller one does). Most of the small 4TB+ drives (other than ssd) seem to want to draw a bit more power than supported. I've also seen such drives have a small 1st partition that holds recovery software that is too small to be used by the dvr so it won't use it (i even had one i needed a special (software) tool to remove the first partition before it would recognize drive). Occasionally I have also seen usb 3.0 drives not work well with certain cables but work ok with others. I'm trying to remember if the 5TB elements i tried was one of those but I know a Seagate 5TB didn't work with supplied cables on most things other than usb 3 even on some of my laptops.or as storage on the usb port of router/access point.

Provided it isn't drawing too much power, a completely empty drive should automatically format, if anything is on the drive you will have to format it from the device's web page and occasionally evenbif you think it us empty. It will format the drive as xfs which typically can only be used properly with Linux.

[jasonl]

And just to clarify, there is no onboard storage on a FLEX, so if you're recording, either the drive is working, or you have a DVR running on something else like a computer.

[nickk]

Can you please enable "send diagnostic information" in the settings menu of the HDHomeRun app, then reply back with the Device ID of your HDHomeRun...

[Lupie4life]

Update on my FLEX 4K not recording....
The HD I attached to my FLEX 4K is a WD Elements 6TB drive with its own power supply. I removed it and attached it to my work PC to see if it was recognizable....and it was. I have since plugged it back in to the FLEX 4K, but it is still not picking it up. When I look at settings, under the devices, it only shows the FLEX 4K and a storage capacity of .5TB. It seems that there is a small amount of onboard DVR storage as it has been recording a few shows. I would guess this storage is for the live TV pause & rewind functionality.

I have since turned on the capture diagnostics feature as requested. The device ID is 10ACA71B. Any help / guidance is greatly appreciated. THANK YOU!!

[signcarver]

That would imply you have a small 512GB partition on that drive... as i recall it will only format and use the first partition of a drive and sometimes those drives contain a small partition that they shipped with recovery software on them. The other possibility is another flex on the network with another usb drive (probably flash drive) plugged in as the device itself has no such storage, only external storage you add.

Though nickk, jasonl, or NedS can probably determine that is the case from the logs (I would attach the drive with the sending of diagnostics already turned on, or power cycle the HDHR), you could check the partition information on a pc. How you do that will depend on what type of PC (i.e. a windows pc it can be done with diskpart (where you would need to know how to select the disk to list the partitions) or disk management, a linux pc one can often use lsblk, fdisk or parted, a mac the disk utility or diskutil ). But note that generally only a linux pc can recognize the data saved in the XFS partition that is used by the flex (a mac or windows pc may have limited read capabilities, though often involves installing other software, and last I checked didn't like to write to xfs partitions).

[NedS]

You have the DVR enabled on an Android device by mistake. Open the HDHomeRun app on that Android phone/tablet/streaming box, go into the settings, and turn off "Use this device for recordings".

Then go to http://hdhomerun.local and click on the "format" button to format the drive for the FLEX.