hi there,

my dti6300 seems to be playing up, as i get messages like, your hard drive is not ready, it will be ready soon.

so im guessin the harddrive is going.

could any body tell me the biggest size drive you can out in, and can you put any in? will any of these be okay?
http://www.pcworld.co.uk/gbuk/compon...ves-715-c.html

cheers.

Being a Thomson, it's more likely that the power supply (PSU) is failing. It may be able to supply enough power to other components, but the HDD needs more.
If you know what you're doing (danger of electric shock), look at the capacitors in the PSU to see if they are bulging. If they are, you'll need to get them replaced.

Chris.

Thanx for the fast reply.
I only changed the caps about 3 months ago. Unless is some other caps.

May try a diff hdd before I buy one.
( or a new pvr )

Ok, I think it may be a good idea to check another HDD first. Or maybe try the one from the Thomson on a PC?

Chris.

Where did you get your replacement capacitors from and do you happen to remember what brand they were?

I only ask as there is some real rubbish out there. Fit poor caps and a couple of months would be all you can expect before failure (remember the DTi 6300 is on 24/7 even if it is supposedly in "Stand-by"). Maplin are guilty here, they often sell Jamicon capacitors, which are well known as a poor brand.

If you only replaced the two caps that regularly fail, try some more from Satcure. They sell very high grade Panasonics which will probably outlive the rest of the box.

Cullimore, sorry, I forgot to include a link to those Panasonic capacitors so here it is.

However if you are convince your Power Supply is OK and your hard disk really has failed then you need to install a 3.5" PATA (also known as IDE) drive. The ones you linked to are SATA which have more modern conncetions. PATA disks are still available from people like Amazon or SCAN, but they are more expensive than their SATA counterparts. You don't need to install the same size disk, you might as well install a 250 GB one if you are going to go down this route (assuming your current one is a 160GB disk). There are reports that the DTi-6300 can handle upto 500GB disks but I have never tried this.

There are some people on Kafka's World who have successfully used a SATA disk with a PATA to SATA converter, but I have never tried this so cannot personally comment.