Review: Expressvu External Hard Drive 9242 HD PVR (Part 3)

In part 2, I described most of the troubles I had so far with the Expressvu External Hard Drive 9242 HD PVR. Since my EHD(LaCie 750GB) was full of recordings(test only), I was not able to access the EHD. It would always reboot when I wanted to access the EHD.

BellTV has released v183 of the firmware since yesterday.



In my case, I had to:

• connect my EHD to my computer


• remove the 3 partitions(1.01GB, 500.01GB, 197.62GB)


• make a quick reformat


• then reconnect the drive to the 9242 HD PVR


• let it reformat again by the 9242 HD PVR

If you are lucky, you will only have the make the last 2 steps.

So far, I only archived 4 recordings for a total of 5 hours. I did not have any problem. Even the playback worked from the EHD when I was fast forwarding at 300x. In the previous version, I had the "drive disconnected" bug.

Since I don't completely trust the new v183, I'm only archiving already seen HD shows/movies until it's full again. I suggest you do the same. But If your drive is smaller, full and you don't have problems, please leave a comment for the others.

But l hope it work and does not give me problems when it's full too. ;)

F.A.Q.:

You can't just connect the drive to a Windows PC and copy the movies from the EHD. Hollywood would not allow that in the first place. If you do connect the drive to you PC and later connect it to the 9242 HD PVR, you will be force to reformat the EHD.

I did not test using the EHD and connect it to another 9242 HD PVR without losing anything with the new version.

If you want to transfer movies to your PC, it won't be in HD. You could record the movie using a standalone DVD recorder and then copy the movie to your PC. That's the easiest way.

I don't know of any software that will read directly from the EHD to copy the HD movie to the PC.

P.S. It's BellTV now.

Edit 2008-11-08: After filling the 750GB, I still have the same rebooting problem when accessing the EHD. I had more than 100 hours in HD recorded.  v183 is more stable but still bugging when full.