Dish DVR 622 - external hard disc thread

I encountered an annoying problem with my DISH 622 DVR yesterday. I have 5 hard discs that I have purchased to store programming I receive via this DVR. I have literally HUNDREDS of films and TV shows stored on these discs. Suddenly I am getting a message when I connect one of these 5 drives to the DVR. "this external hard disc is associated to work with a different DVR. would you like to associate it with this dvr?" None of the 5 drives have ever been used with ANY OTHER dvr. Of course, I can say yes to the association request, but I know that you can only change associations with external drives 3 times before you have to reformat it. I don't want to lose my stored programs. Anyone else have this problem? Also, did DISH limit the number of external drives that can be associated with any one DVR without saying so in any of their literature or online messages related to this feature? I've sent an e-mail to DISH, but just wondered if anyone already knew about this situation.

John Devine
[email protected]


An excellent question John, and one that I would like to find out about myself. I also have external drives attached to two of my four Dish HD DVRS (a 722 and a 622) and might be looking to expand a bit like you did. I was already aware that a drive is associated with a particular box and was hoping that Dish will eventually make good on the promise to upgrade the software so that once formatted the drives you own will be transportable to any otehr Dish HD DVR in your own home. They mentioned something about this last September at CEDIA 2007 since this would be one way to move things around the house. Obviously the software would have to limit this to a single household's equipment or there would probably be some DRM issues. But yours is a slightly different issue. I wasn't aware that there is a three time "association" limit before re-formatting a drive. Maybe this is related to DRM issues to prevent people from freely exchanging HD content? Is this something new? Is it possible that the latest version of the firmware now allows one to move a drive from one box to another but limits the number of times to three? If that's the case, then that seems to defeat the purpose of having the ability to move drives between one's multiple DVRs in a home. It certainly hampers what you are trying to do with multiple drives on a single 622. If you haven't done this already I would suggest that you call Dish to discuss all of this with a Dish HD tech person. I have found them to be very willing to discuss such items (assuming that you get to a true HD tech guy/gal and not just a regular staffer) and either tell you what's planned or take your situation into consideration for a future firmware update.

Like I said, please post anything that you find out.

Thanks and good luck.

I sent an e-mail to Dish Tech support and they responded quickly asking for a complete system info list. That has been sent back to them and now I'm just waiting for their response based on the tech data readout.
Keeping fingers crossed that it was all associated with one of their famous 4am software downloads with a slight glitch in the code, eh?