After nearly 18 months of service my Alba ALDTR160 has had a funny turn.

On rebooting, it comes up with the message "The hard drive requires formatting. Should this be done now?".

If I say no, it boots but the PVR functions are disabled. Attempting to access library or timers gives the message "Hard drive initialisation failed. Recording and playback functions are disabled".

My question is, can anything be done to rescue the saved programmes, preferably without resorting to removing the hard drive? Or failing that, can I at least access the index to see what was saved? Via the RS232 interface maybe?

The drive is/was about 3/4 full with programmes from the last year or so, all sadly unwatched due to the arrival of our first child.

Any help would be greatly appreciated.

You could probably get access to the index via RS232, but you'd really have to know the correct commands etc. However even if you did, you would not be able to copy the files off via the RS232 socket.

If it is out of guarantee then I would really just go down the route of removing the drive and plugging into my PC. I'm pretty sure the Alba's (and all Vestels) use the Linux EXT3 filesystem though so you would need either a Linux boot CD, or an Ext3 filesystem driver to access it if you use Windows. Maybe someone who has actually done this with a Vestel PVR can advise better.

Basically you'll need some way of reading the disk, which means on a computer. It's a matter of ide drive comapatibility, probably got round using a USB caddy (since, most current computers have newer SATA drives).

If you can do that, reading the ext3 filesystem shouldn't be a problem, although "recovering" the material is difficult!

Lots of relevant threads, eg:

http://www.digitalspy.com/forums/sho...d.php?t=664386

There's no disk file acces via the RS232 port!

Of course, even if it were possible, nobody would want to use it considering it would take around 21 hours to transfer even a 1Gb file . The only use of the RS232 port is for debug output and uploading software upgrades, AFAIK.

That's hypothetical, since there's no disk access by "that door". But yes, 115kb/s would take a long time ..........

Thanks for the help.

I had a quick play around with access via the RS232 port, didn't get very far, so bit the bullet and sent the disk contents off to meet their maker.

Lesson learned. Don't let the backlog get too big and/or don't have any more kids.

Today this happened to me. It's a T825 on V13. King Bear's Alba is also a T825.

Declining the reformat results in the box rebooting after a minute or two and displaying the reformat message again.
After a few groundhog cycles of this I selected the reformat option.

My impression is that this disk issue is rare. Any other reports of this happening? Any similar reports on Vestels that are not on T825? Any similar reports that are Vestels that are using earlier than V13?