External drive to DVR Box

Hey guys. Anyone out there have experience connecting an external hard drive to a cable tv high def DVR box? I have it connected using the eSATA cable, but it's giving me an error message that it's not connected properly and the check the cable and power inputs, but those are connected fine. I'm formating the drive right now as I type, so we'll see if that works. the drive is a Seagate 320gig (of which I'm disappointed I only got 298 actual gigs), and I'm trying to hook it up to a Scientific Atlanta 8300HD DRV box. Thanks for any input guys.

Um, I have Dish Network DVR here, and the files on the internal drive were either encrypted (doubt it) or using linux or some other operating system. When we had the house fire though, the HD's looked okay so we ripped em out and formatted to ntfs and they make great computer drives. (Seagate 7200rpm's woohoo!). In any event if it says your drive is messed up try using a linux bootdisk and format it in linux format. That's my best guess: I'm not sure if it'll work or not, but you can try it.

BTW: is your external drive connector (on the box) really SATA? The Dish one was USB.

Yeah, the external connects to the dvr box only via SATA. had it connected to my pc since I bought it, which was this past sunday, through the usb. connected fine to my pc with no problems.

Odd. Not sure what to tell you if it worked on the pc but not the external. Good luck with the formatting (seriously, not being sarcastic), hope that works for you.