Hey all - I built me a great little PCNVR like GrayMan demonstrated and put in a brandy-new 2TB Seagate HDD (Seagate NAS HDD ST2000VN000 2TB 64MB Cache SATA 6.0Gb/s), but it *refuses* to use more than 1 or maybe 2% of the drive's storage, giving me less than one day's recordings.  I've tried both the HIkvision iVMS-4200 software and GeniusVision, and they both do the same thing.  I've reformatted the drive several times, but no luck.  There seems to be talk of things like "quotas" but I've monkeyed with the settings to no avail.  I tried to format to exFAT rather than NTFS, but XP doesn't seem to want me to.  Though I swear I was able to do it once before...    when I try now through command prompt it tells me

Any chance any of you geniuses would have an ideas?  I'm really excited to get this system up and running, but not being able to use the storage HDD is a real bummer.

Thanks all!

Its got to be a setting in the software. I am not familiar with you programs but they usually have a setting associated with storage space.

Did you allocate the drive in the iVMS software?  The iVMS-4200 needs to allocate the space on the drive for use.

It would take being a Fat32 to impact you and that would limit you to 4gb and it sounds like you're hitting 40gig give or take?  2%@2tb.

Disk quotas wouldn't be an issue out of the box with xp.

How is the drive attached?  Is it a network storage device or attached to this xp box or what?   If it is a nas then possibly something weird with the nas controller hardware.

Seems unlikely that two different softwares would have the same limitations but it's possible.

Where/how does it error out or does it just not let you add more than a fraction of the space as a storage pool for the software or?

Hey guys - thanks so much for the helpful responses.  Sorry for the delay - life's been pretty crazy.

I tried every last setting possible, and finally GeniusVision tech support just stopped e-mailing me back, insisting it was a problem with the HDD.  It's a 2 TB Seagate (specs in the original post), and it's an internal drive I added to this rather barebones PC that work had no use for.  Now you're making me think......perhaps it could be a driver issue with the drive???

So I was finally able to format the drive in exFAT (I needed an update to XP) and right now we're at 50 GB used out of 2 TB, which between four 3-MP cams and flies loving the IR means the *oldest* file not yet overwritten was 1 hour and 20 minutes ago.  Quite the downer.  The amount it will use on the HDD does seem to increase by a tiny bit over time, but in the meantime it just overwrites that first bit as soon as it's full.

I did try to get all the iVMS stuff reinstalled to try it, but quickly remembered one of the biggest reasons I stopped using it; it was hopelessly slow on this PC.  Even the stream from one cam wouldn't display in realtime without substantial stuttering.  By contrast, GV will run all four cams with minimal, very livable stuttering.

Thanks for all the help, guys - this is for REAL frustrating!!  I *hate* to admit that I'm actually considering calling Geek Squad if I can't get this worked out...I do need this to be running!  Thanks again, all.

So I just looked at the HDD driver and it's a Microsoft driver from 2001 :)  lemme telll you, if you all just fixed this for me, I owe you ALL a beer!!  Looking for a better driver now.

I would format the drive as NTFS through the Disk Management Feature in XP.  I would delete any partitions on it and create a single partition then format as NTFS.  Once the drive shows as useable 2TB in windows then configure the camera software.

I completely agree with telc.  Have you actually confirmed that XP is formatting the HD to 2TB.  In other words, is the problem there before you start implementing the camera software?

Sooo I figured I owed the forum an update, even at the cost of being a laughingstock.

The thing is working fine - and it always has.

Turns out two things combined to give me great confusion.  The first is that my research into this had led me to believe that four 3MP cams running motion detection outside would be filling that 2 TB drive up really quickly.  It turns out this is not the case.

The second is that I was using the "All Countings" tab in GeniusVision to view the recorded video, which for some strange reason only shows the last 2ish hours of footage.  So thus far I've not bee able to find a way in GeniusVision to view all the events from all cameras in chronological order, which I believe is the default for the Hikvision VMS software.

SO, these two things combined led me to the absolute wrong conclusion.  But I am shocked and amazed at how wonderful it is now, and although GeniusVision isn't perfect, it is a really great piece of free software.  I love how many different viewing options there are, and also that it uses *such* little CPU.

I'm sorry that I'm an idiot.  Many thanks for the help, guys!