DEDICATED MICROS

Ever had to wait 4 weeks to get new hard drives put in a sprite well here is a way I found around it. I only did this on units that where out of warranty of course and it worked successfully on the following units. BX2, DS2A DX16C, DS2P DX16C, DS DX16C & D4 DX4C. The latest sprites have the operating system of flash ram where the previous versions had it on drive c or the primary drive. The sprite uses a fat32 file system so you can easily read it on windows based pc. I created backup files of the working sprites as I came across different models when they where out of warranty. Disconnect power from the sprite and remove the cover and you have a primary drive and generally a secondary drive. Disconnect the power and ide cable from the primary and connect a usb to ide converter to the primary and then connect the usb to ide converter to a windows based pc, the pc should recognize the drive and you should be able to bring up a directory of the drive. Create a folder on your pc with the model of the sprite i.e. ‘DS2 DX16C 320GB’, this way you know what model sprite you have copied the files from and copy all files and folders of the primary sprite drive to the folder on your pc except for the ‘VIDEO0’ folder. This folder contains all the recorded images and takes a long time to copy. Once all files and folders have been copied to the folder on your pc now create a folder called ‘VIDEO0’ in that sprite folder on your pc. Now disconnect the usb to ide converter from the primary hard drive and reconnect the primary drive of the sprite and disconnect the secondary drive on the sprite. Now connect a new drive as the secondary drive on the sprite and be sure to set drive jumper and power the sprite up. The sprite during power up should come up with a message or prompt about preparing secondary drive for storage allow it to do it this could take about 5 minutes. When the sprite has finally booted up shut it down and disconnect the secondary drive from the sprite. Connect the usb to ide converter to the secondary drive and then to your pc and do a directory of the drive and delete all files on it. Now copy all the files from your back up folder on the pc to the secondary drive. Now change the drive jumper from a secondary to primary and install it in the sprite as the primary drive and then get another new drive and set its jumper to secondary drive and install it in the sprite. When you have done this power up the sprite. The sprite will come up with a warning about cannot find primary image storage creating a new one, this is fine just let it go and then it will come with another warning about the secondary drive and allow it to create image storage on that as well. This whole process will take about ten minutes or so and once it is complete the sprite will boot as normal. Once it has booted go into the sprite and check available storage it will be around 13 to 20 gig less than your combined total of your two drives. I usually replace 160 gig drives with 300+ gig drives and the sprites worked fine giving increased storage.

Here are some links to www.cctvforum.com

http://www.cctvforum.com/viewtopic.php?t=7369

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