My mother's Wharfedale DTR160 has come up with the fault 'Disk initialisation failure' and will no longer record or play what is on the disk.

Does anyone have any ideas on how this can be fixed?

Its nearly 4 years old so out of any kind of warranty.

Well, probably the hard drive is knackered, so anything that was stored on there will be gone for good unfortunately. It's relatively easy to take the hard drive out and replace it with a new one, although economically it may be cheaper to buy a new box. Depends how cheaply you can find a 160Gb IDE hard drive for.

FYI, the Wharfedale is made by Vestel and is presumably a T816 model according to the age you mention. The current model that Vestel make is a T835, available with various name badges. The software is very similar to the DTR160 (but is now full Freeview+ and has series link, etc) and the remote control is identical, so if that's a factor and you decide against replacing the hard drive, something like the Hitachi HDR165 is highly recommended (£70 currently at Argos) and there are higher capacity models available too. More info on the T835 models and Vestel PVRs in general can be found at http://www.vestelpvr.futaura.co.uk/T835.php.

Thanks.

We got it working again by reformatting the disk. However we lost everything that was recorded.

Be aware that formatting may be a temporary measure - if the original problem was caused by a failing HDD, the problem will most likely come back again at some point sooner or later.