leemardo

I had a similar situation a few years ago, as I recall the dvr would allow me to use the PATA drive as a slave storage drive but not the primary, the primary had to be a SATA 1

I changed the drive on on an old d4 beige unit a while back, I've done several other dedicated micros units in the past couple of years. Here is what I did and it worked fine. Format the hard drive as fat 32 Download the proper firmware from dedicated micros Unzip the firmware to the new hard drive Go into the bootloader folder, copy the bootloader file and then paste it in the top level of the drive Install the drive in the dvr, make sure it's jumper is set for master When the dvr powers up it'll recognize the new drive and install the software. I have had supposedly good drives not work, when I tried a different drive it worked just fine, other than that this method has worked on four or five different dedicated micros units.

Installing the hard drive in one of these is actually very easy as long as you use a sata I drive, I was having the same problem until I realized the drive I was using was a sata II, I moved the jumper on the drive to be sata I compatible and it formatted it right away. Use a sata I unallocated drive (not already formatted) and it couldn't be easier. These units are cheap because the company went out of business (and no hard drives are included) not because they're bad dvr's. The features on this thing are actually quite nice, 480 fps and 16 channels of audio with an hdmi out option for less than 200 dollars is an awesome deal. Having to learn to replace the hard drive up front is a bit of a hassle, but it's something you'll have to learn eventually anyway.

I'm a security tech but my company's primary dvr is a pc based system. We have a couple of dedicated micros dvr's in the field and I like them a lot so when I noticed you can buy them dirt cheap on ebay because of their supposed difficulty of replacing bad hard drives I bought a few over the years, each time replacing hard drives and reloading firmware with no issues. I was using 10 cameras on a 16 camera unit but was a little disappointed with the refresh rate so I got the bright idea to replace it with a ds2p six channel and a d4. The ds2p went great, bought it for next to nothing with a bad hard drive, put in the drives from my old unit and updated the firmware and was good to go, it blazes along at 120pps with no issues whatsoever. The d4 was supposedly a working unit when I bought it, but when it arrived it would'nt even go into bootloader. When you plug it in it beeps 21 times with no video out whatsoever. The seller claims he's 100 percent sure it was working when he packed it up. I'm thinking the hard drive may have taken an impact in shipping, but all my other dedicated micros dvr's would go into bootloader regardless of a bad drive, are the d4 models different in that regard? Nevermind, it turned out the drive was bad but it wasn't the problem with the blank monitor, I prepped a new drive and popped it in. The dvr then booted up and started recording after a few minutes, all with no monitor out. Upon further inspection there was a scorched area of the PCB in the region of the monitor output and camera one input. I'm gonna return this thing to the seller.