# New Bolt Vox does not recognize external hard drive



## drakus (Oct 19, 2019)

I recently took advantage of the Tivo deal to get a 1TB and 500GB Bolt Vox with the intent of upgrading both with 4TB drives.

I bought WD Red 4 TB (WD40EFRX)
and the Rosewill enclosure (RX304-APU3-35B)

I opened the case and plugged it into the SATA port on the motherboard. Upon boot I get the 4 flashing lights. I've tried different cables and a different enclosure with the same results. I also tried plugging the original hard drive into the enclosure and that fails as well.

Finally I plugged both drives into my computer and used dd to clone the original drive to the larger to see if that would work and that fails as well.

From reading through the forums, my understanding was you could just plug the drive in, upon first boot it would auto format the drive (in this case it would do only 2TB). Then I would use the MFS Reformatter to expand it.

What am I missing


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## ggieseke (May 30, 2008)

If you used the "internal" drive SATA port on the motherboard it should work, but recent versions of the TE4 (21.x.x) software have been sketchy.


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## shwru980r (Jun 22, 2008)

drakus said:


> I recently took advantage of the Tivo deal to get a 1TB and 500GB Bolt Vox with the intent of upgrading both with 4TB drives.
> 
> I bought WD Red 4 TB (WD40EFRX)
> and the Rosewill enclosure (RX304-APU3-35B)
> ...


You could try connecting the drive to a PC and using the manufacturers diagnostic utility, write zeros to the drive.


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## V7Goose (May 28, 2005)

you need to connect the DRIVE directly to the SATA cable too, just like the Bolt motherboard. You cannot use an eSATA port on either device.


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## Wigohwt (Jun 9, 2019)

drakus said:


> I also tried plugging the original hard drive into the enclosure and that fails as well.


I take it that the original drive works when it's in the Bolt?

As long as you don't have the Bolt Vox OTA, get the Bolt working with the original drive first, and change to TE3 before trying your upgrade. If you prefer TE4, you can risk the change later.


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## Wigohwt (Jun 9, 2019)

drakus said:


> Finally I plugged both drives into my computer and used dd to clone the original drive to the larger to see if that would work and that fails as well.


Did you try connecting the enclosure (make sure its power is plugged in) with the 4TB to your PC to check if the enclosure is working? Maybe the enclosure is non-functioning? Use the USB cable first, and check if your PC can see, format, and read/write to the drive.

While there, you can test the 4TB with Data Lifeguard Diagnostic for Windows "QUICK" and "EXTENDED" commands.
You can also do the aforementioned zeroing with the "ERASE" command.
Make sure you do this only on the 4TB.


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## drakus (Oct 19, 2019)

So what finally worked for me was to directly connect the drive to the motherboard, and use the enclosures power, bypassing the enclosure's eSATA port. For some reason the bolt does not like having an intermediate connector. Thanks all for the help.


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