and the usb ports and the sata port arent active yet but the firewire port is supposed to be active. so i connected the hard drive with the firewire cable instead of the usb. and i dont think the dvr knows there is anything connected to it cause i still get a message saying that there isnt enough space to record shows so how can i get my dvr to know that there is a hard drive connected to it? Someone said something about drivers for it but how do i do that with an optical drive for the software installation disc that came with it? thanks for an advice! Star trek is the best!

An alternative is that some satellite or (more commonly) cable set-top boxes have a FireWire port that can be connected to a computer. The recorded MPEG stream can be relayed to the computer via this FireWire port; though it can be done live, this is more commonly used for transferring shows from a set-top box with built-in DVR.

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