Hello,

I've got a Thomson DHD 4000 DVR (Freeview, with a 20 hour HDD). On the whole I'm very pleased with it (had it 3 years). However, it now has only about 5-6 hours of programmes on it according to Record History, yet on Record List it says there's only 27 min of the 20 hour disk space left.

a) If I watch the progs on there and delete them, is it likely to sort itself out?

b) If I do (a) then do a return to factory defaults, should that do it, do you think?

c) Is it now a decorative paperweight?

If it was a PC I could empty the drive and then format it. Is there any way to do similar to this? I guess in extremis I could remove the HDD (I gather it's just an IDE disk) and format it in a PC, but that sounds a bit desperate and I've no idea what file system to use.

Help!

Edit: since I posted this I found a thread about HDD upgrades/replacements, guess if I need the nuclear option I can try this. It would be nice not to have to though...

http://www.digitalspy.co.uk/forums/s...=176236&page=3

And one thing I found hard to understand - assuming the FAT tables are screwed and the HDD is basically OK, what exactly do I have to do to it? Is deleting any partition Ok (FDISK, killdisk), or do I have to erase the MBR (how?). I'm reasonably familiar with this sort of thing on a PC.

I did format a DHD4000 drive back in the days of the "Yellow Light Of Death".

I removed the drive and put it in a PC. I then used the Samsung manufacturer utils to write zero's over the disk. When the disk goes back in the DHD4000 it then formats the disk automatically. If you do go this way you might as well run a drive test as well, just to ensure it hasn't got any dodgy sectors.

I had fitted a larger Samsung drive, hence using their utils. Depending on what make of drive is in your DHD4000 you might need to download those utils from some other manufacturer website, but I think most will provide similar options to Samsung.

It might be worth checking for how to get into the DHD4000 hidden menu. I can't remember whether there is a format drive option in there or not, but if there is that would be the easiest.

Its quite possible that one of your recordings is 'corrupt'. It might play ok, but when deleted you may find all of your lost space suddenly returns.

So, to resolve your problem, first try watching and then deleting all your stored programmes. If that doesn't work then go into the Engineering Menu to see the hard drive options. What version of software are you running? The magic numbers needed to access the engineering menu varies with the software issue. Search this forum for more information.

At this stage there is no need to even consider a HDD change, unless you really want to do that.

Pop

I had no idea there was a secret menu.

I asked that nice Professor Google about it and he sent me straight back to Digitalspy, who coughed up the access code for it pronto. I just went and tried it out, and there is indeed a format HDD option within the 'Factory Defaults' section.

So, I'll watch all the progs (I've got all of a series of American Dad on there, this is serious) and either it remembers how big it is or I format the disk. Brilliant.

Thanks guys, this forum is a mine of info. Please, please, don't get out more.

> only about 5-6 hours of programmes on it according to Record
> History, yet on Record List it says there's only 27 min of the 20

Sorry if this is teaching you to suck eggs, but that time includes what you have set to record as well as what you have already recorded. If you have a lot of things in the record list then that could account for your 27 mins left.

How are the bars on the screen underneath the est. time free? The dark blue is what's used (in the history), the yellow bar is what's reserved by recordings you have set (and the buffer), and the light blue is what's free.

The buffer is set within the menu setup > features > trick-mode buffer length and is the time you can rewind live TV for, this will reserve space also.

From your description, it sounds like you have a corrupt recording on there. If you scroll through the list you can usually tell which one it is because the thumbnails at the top show either blank or scrambled (though not always). Sometimes these programmes are watchable, other times they just freeze when you try to play them. You can try watching it and if it fails then just delete it.

You probably don't need to format the disk, just get rid of the wrong'un.

Slimgym - fair question, but there's nothing set to record. the time remaining bars show the usual half-hour or so of buffer in yellow, with almost all of it the 'used up' dark blue.

Trevor - good idea, I'll look at that.

Something's going on a bit more than a corrup recording though. I watched/deleted about 2 hours worth and it only gave me an hour of time back. Now I can access the secret workings I'll run the checks once it's empty (assuming it doesn't right itself then) and then format the drive using its own utility.

...I've now

a) watched and deleted all the programmes (all played fine)

b) returned to factory defaults

c) gone into the secret menu and selected format the hard disk (nothing seemed to happen - are there any mystical incantations I must recite to get it to do this?)

d) rolled back the software to the previous version (makes no difference except the "time remaining" figure disappears altogether).

On either version of software the time bar just shows the yellow buffer period right at the very start with all the rest "free". However, if I set it to record blocks of random TV on manual timer, the bar fills up as though it does indeed only have 14 h 45 min of space on it, not the 20 h it's supposed to have.

I can only assume that either (a) the HDD has either a bad zone (b) the HDD has a block of corrupted data it can't erase or (c) something else.

Now it's working OK apparently, so maybe I should accept a 14.75 hour PVR. But where's the fun in that?

I suppose I can explore the status of the HDD by wrenching it out and hitching it up to a PC. I read elsewhere here that I could format it for Windows and reuse it as long as I remove any partitions I put on it using FDISK or equivalent. If it looks duff, amazingly you can still get Seagate 80 Gb or 160 Gb IDE hard drives (for about £35).

The "20-hour" limit has been covered in this forum before. The specification states "up to 20 hours" recording time in LP mode. Recordings are made in SP mode and can later be compressed into LP mode. It appears that Thomson did change the specs after the product was launched. Also, none of the various technical documents (spec sheet, user manual, etc.) seem to fully agree with each other!

The actual (rather than the reported) recording time available will depend on the bit rate of the stream being recorded, and the box will usually only report around 14 hours for an empty HDD (assumimg you have the original 40GB drive). Its likely that you will be able to record more than this reported figure, but it does depend on the bit rate of the channel you are recording.

If you want more space you can always fit a larger HDD (also covered in this forum many times - use the search facility for more info).

Pop

I looked at a lot of threads on here but I didn't see that one (well, there's quite a few!).

I was concerned I had a HDD in the process of going south (as in you'd never use one in a PC once bad sectors start to appear), but given what you've said, maybe I'll leave it alone after all, as it seems to work OK generally.

The time available isn't really a problem, as we actually have 2 between us. The second one seems to add its time up more as you'd expect, but as you say this would depend on the resolution of what's coming down. Also, I may well get the Freesat Humax version when it comes out anyway.

Thanks for that!