I think I better tell you the whole story it may make more sense then. The initial 1tb external drive worked fine for years. Then one day it refused to work with timer record. I tried to record manually and that still worked and more importantly I could still play the recordings. I contacted Sony who told me to copy all of the information from the hard drive to my pc and then re format the external drive on the tv. As I did not have enough space on my pc hard drive i bought another external drive and copied all the information to that. I did as requested and re formatted the external drive with the tv. It doesn't give you an option as far as format goes it is just fat 32. After doing that I sat for hours transferring everything back to the original external drive. Once that was done i connected it back up to the tv but it said there was no hard drive connected. I tried the new external drive which i copied the information to
but it said there was no recordings. Even though the new drive was also formatted to fat 32.So I had lost nearly half a terabyte of recordings. I knew it was a bad idea to in effect wipe the original but i was assured that once i copied the information back it would be ok. Having lost everything I decided to try
recording on the new hard drive and repeat the process of copying it to the pc then re formatted the drive (Fat 32) and copying it back to the newly formatted drive to see what happened. It said no recordings were on the hard drive. I have read somewhere recently when i was trying to work out why this happened that the file system that Sony use is encrypted so cannot be copied to a pc or another external drive. I don't know if this is the case but if it is and I had been told this I could have left the original drive as it was so that i could still watch the recordings and use a second drive for timer recordings instead of wasting hours messing about copying it only to find that I was worse off than when i started. At least before they told me to copy everything I could at least watch the recordings.The new drive works fine now I have deleted the information that i copied onto it but I am just really annoyed that they told me to copy the information in the first place especially if what i have read is correct and the file system used by Sony cannot be copied. Hope this makes sense now.
