It seems my beloved DHD4000 has stopped working over the weekend. It powers up and gets to a red light but then wont respond - even on the remote or the buttons on the STB. I have tried the pedroski method, nothing. Been steadily getting worse over the past few weeks with it loosing all my recordings last week for no reason.Can anyone suggest something to get it back up and running before the wife really goes mad (I had a call at 7am saying the kids couldnt watch CBBC )

Put the old 40gb disk back in - that would be my first test - you do still have it there "just in case", don't you ?

Matt

Errrr, nope Weird as its been working for over 18 months with the 120gb disk in it. Maybe a new MCE is needed

Doh!!

I've only just replaced my old 40gb drive, but I'm sure as hell keeping it *just in case* !! Of course, it could be a red herring, but at least you'd be able to rule out the HDD.

Matt

I ran loads of diag tests on the disk at the weekend (seek, read/write, cache tests etc) and all reported 100% OK. Dont think its the disk so maybe a fault with the mobo board?

There is really only one option available to you. Wipe the disk. I fill mine with zero's, and as a last resort, this has never failed.

As Thomson chose not to include a "format disk" function, (or to hide it, where no-one has managed to find it) this means removing the disk and plugging it into something else (e.g. a PC). There have been at least two occasions where this was the only way I could restore normal operation.

On a brighter note, once you get into a situation such as this, you have nothing to lose (library etc.) as you already can't use it. But once the disk is removed you have the option of running Karl's extractor which may well recover most, if not all of your recordings.

When doing the read/write test this is destructive and wipes the disk. What program do you use to wipe it with zero's?

Good point about the extractor as I have not used it yet - does it work well?

Cheers

I've only used the extractor once (when I upgraded the disk, so I could extract my history) and it transferred every item perfectly - couldn't fault it!

Matt

Rekall - I live near to you and have noticed, in the past, that when you have had update errors I have got them too.

I think that something has changed in the update over the last couple of months.

My dad, who lives around here and owns an UNMODIFIED Aug 05 model has had similar problems to me and others on this forum.

See my post and others here:
http://forum.digitalspy.co.uk/board/...d.php?t=310823

Interesting thanks! Mine has definately got worse over the past 3 - 4 weeks although I have not had the problem since about 3 Jan.