ProVue How to Format a Hard Drive

Hi, this is Eric from Backstreet Surveillance. Today we're going to go over a video on how to format your hard drive on your NVR. So first of all, what we're going to do is with a mouse button we're going to left click on the start button. We're going to go to set up. And then notice under the device it says disc. So disc is the same thing as a hard drive. So as we click on this, you'll notice that we have two hard drives here. Now, the question we ask is, why do you want to format a hard drive? There are two reasons, one, when you get a brand new hard drive that you put into your system for the first time, it will be formatted in order to prepare it to get it ready to record. And this usually takes about 30 seconds, give or take, depending on the size of the drive.

The second reason for formatting a drive may be less obvious. You may have been using your existing hard drive for a number of months, perhaps years, and all of a sudden your system stops recording. If you've checked your other settings on your NVR and everything looks good, it may be that you may have what's called bad sectors on your hard drive, in other words, wear from use, which is normal. And so in order to get it functional again, what you may need to do is to format the hard drive.

And notice we've selected the top one here, and we're going to click format HDD, meaning hard drive. Notice the message that comes up, it says to format the entire disk, and all data will be erased. And so all of the videos that were on there prior to this will be erased and it will lock out the bad sectors and prepare it again for use. And so once you hit okay, then it's going to ask for your password to get into the NVR. And once you put this in and get authenticated then it's going to begin formatting or erasing the hard drive and get it prepared for use again. And so that is how you format a hard drive. Thanks for watching and have a good day.