I used my three-year old (ie, early production) Foxsat HDR satisfactorily on Sunday night. Come Monday daytime, booting-up produced a pop-up stating 'HDD Not Available'. And thus it has remained. I've tried pulling the power, waiting a decent interval (say, one minute), then reconnecting, powering up and booting, but still with the same result.

Any ideas, anyone? Is it possible the drive has simply died?

In fact, I've been having a few problems with the Foxsat lately, so maybe I should have regarded those as warning signals. Firstly, the machine accpted bookings to record programmes during the night but failed to actually reord any that start after around 11.30 pm (but happily recorded whatever was set during the day and evening!). Then a month or so back it apparently popped-up a box saying that the HDD needed to be reformatted. My wife just thought it was the same old channel additions/deletions thing, so pressed OK. So we lost nearly 100 hours of recorded programmes (there's no stopping it once started!). And where originally I was able to record two channels while watching a third, it has refused to play that game for several months. Has anyone else had similar experiences?

It does sound as if the hdd has died. Repassac had this and after disconnecting the HDD data connections and re-connecting it sprang to life. You could try dropping it into a usb cradle on a PC with EXTFS and copying the contents of the Video folder to your PC. If you can do this you can restore them to a replacement hdd.

You are aware that only specific third channels depending on the recording choice can be viewed.

Indeed - you do need to press OK after the HDD not available message and it will boot. After this, powering down, switching off and reconnecting restored life into the disc.

Thanks for that suggestion. I will certainly try it.

I have tried that, without success, but it is worth a fresh try tomorrow (wifey is watching soaps right now, so the 'experiment' will have to wait!)