Formatting and partitioning a USB hard disk for use with Sony Bravia TV recording
03 Jul 2016
I recently purchased a Sony Bravia RD-453 TV which is able to record to a USB hard disk. However after plugging in two different USB drives and attempting to register them they both errored mid way through.
The TV formats the drive during the registration process so I assumed the initial configuration wouldn’t matter, however this is not the case. I spent a few hours experimenting with different formats and found the following process to work reliably. Basically the disk needs to be formatted as NTFS (I found FAT32 to be detected but error later in the process).
- Connect the hard disk to a computer (I used Ubuntu and gparted for this process but I’m sure it’s possible to do on Windows / Mac OS following a similar process).
- Create a new partition table or type MS-DOS.
- Create a new NTFS partition that fills the rest of the disk.
- Disconnect the drive from the computer and connect to TV
- Complete registration process on TV.
- Record stuff.
This seems to be a common issue with Sony TVs and isn’t well documented. I’ve only tried this on my TV but I suspect it’ll work on any similar TV. I tried a few different drives and the same solution seemed to work on them all.