Possible hard drive issue on HWS?

[olds403]

I have been moving movies and shows from the HWS to external hard drives. This past weekend I noticed that several times I got messages that the transfer failed with errors, or transfer was completed with errors. This was accompanied by 311 and 315 errors stating that a problem was detected with the Hopper hard drive and unplugging it may remedy the problem.

Prior to unplugging and resetting, if I pushed the DVR button on the remote, it would show the hard drive at 100% (even though it was really at 25%) and would not display ANY of the recorded content that was still on the Hopper. After unplugging the Hopper and resetting it, it would return to normal and everything functioned. This happened 3 or 4 times between Friday night and Sunday. I am moving content off incase I need to have it replaced. This is my second HWS, the first one lasted less than a month when it locked up on a software update that was performed while on the phone with Tech Support. This one is approximately 1.5 years old. Do these typically have problems?

 

[Howard Simmons]

I've also gotten the transfer with errors when I transfer hopper to EHD. It's ususally only one program that does it. I've never gotten the 311 or 315 errors and my Hopper is going on 4 years and 3 years with the EHD. You may have another Hopper going bad.

 

[olds403]

If it continues I guess I will contact tech support, I was just wondering if other people had experience the errors and if they were actually an indicator of serious issues. Like I said I am transferring stuff off the Hopper in case it is going bad.

The HWS is internet connected, I thought these error reports were sent out to Dish, do they monitor them?

 

[DISH Support]

If it continues I guess I will contact tech support, I was just wondering if other people had experience the errors and if they were actually an indicator of serious issues. Like I said I am transferring stuff off the Hopper in case it is going bad.

The HWS is internet connected, I thought these error reports were sent out to Dish, do they monitor them?

Hello, Olds403. When receiving a 311 error that normally does mean that something could be going wrong with the Hard Drive. We would recommend checking your hard drive health by press your Home button 3 times (Or Menu twice for 40.0), go to Status, and then Check Status. Under D: Hard Drive Status, it should display it's current health. If this does come back as 'GOOD', but you do see continued issues with these two error messages, we would recommend contacting us for immediate assistance.

Your receiver does send us a health reports each night, and when contacting us, we can review this information to see if there is any technical issue present. - Caleb S

 

[olds403]

I ran the check status and it reported the hard drive health as good, but I still am having issues. This past Friday I had issues with the HWS while trying to watch recorded content from the DVR. It also seems to happen when transferring files to the external hard drive. Turning on the Wireless Joey in the master bedroom seems normal if watching live TV, when attempting to watch DVR content it will sometimes freeze, then go to black screen. The guide and all menus are still available and the WJ shows as linked on the receiver status screen, just no content video. In order to get back to watching anything I have to unplug the HWS in the living room downstairs, and sometimes unplug the WJ (sometimes it will relink on its own, sometimes not). This has been happening multiple times a week and Friday it took me 45 minutes to get everything back in working order.

The wife is NOT happy and ready to scrap DishNetwork. Her reasoning is "I never had these issues with WOW Cable", I am more patient (and technically inclined) and have a large library on external hard drives that I would like to continue to use. It has worked ok for the last two days, although recorded content did freeze up yesterday. All I had to do was go back to live TV and then back to DVR to resume watching the show we were watching. No idea why it froze and I had to go back to the menu. The DVR doesn't seem to like when I quickly hit the skip button multiple times to skip commercials (usually 7 times, 3.5 minutes, works to get through all the commercials so I will quickly hit skip 7 times to get back to the show), that seems to be what triggered the freezup yesterday. I NEVER had any issues with my VIP722, had the same receiver for 10 years with no problems, same can't be said of my Hopper experience.

I am hesitant to call Tech support due to the fact I will be asked to restart everything all over again by unplugging, and it may work fine for a day or a week and then I will have to call them all over again, and spend another hour or so on the phone only to get the same results. It is frustrating.

 

[Howard Simmons]

See the post about the lowest package you can pay for so as to keep your hard drives. Then decide whether you want to stay with Dish.

 

[Jim5506]

Possible MOCA issues?

 

[HipKat]

Possible MOCA issues?

Or connectivity issue. I've seen this before where Joeys fall out completely on DVR and it was a connectivity issue, where the Connection screen showed a half connection to a router that no longer existed. Clearing Connectivity settings to delete that router cleared it right up

 

[DISH Support]

I ran the check status and it reported the hard drive health as good, but I still am having issues. This past Friday I had issues with the HWS while trying to watch recorded content from the DVR. It also seems to happen when transferring files to the external hard drive. Turning on the Wireless Joey in the master bedroom seems normal if watching live TV, when attempting to watch DVR content it will sometimes freeze, then go to black screen. The guide and all menus are still available and the WJ shows as linked on the receiver status screen, just no content video. In order to get back to watching anything I have to unplug the HWS in the living room downstairs, and sometimes unplug the WJ (sometimes it will relink on its own, sometimes not). This has been happening multiple times a week and Friday it took me 45 minutes to get everything back in working order.

The wife is NOT happy and ready to scrap DishNetwork. Her reasoning is "I never had these issues with WOW Cable", I am more patient (and technically inclined) and have a large library on external hard drives that I would like to continue to use. It has worked ok for the last two days, although recorded content did freeze up yesterday. All I had to do was go back to live TV and then back to DVR to resume watching the show we were watching. No idea why it froze and I had to go back to the menu. The DVR doesn't seem to like when I quickly hit the skip button multiple times to skip commercials (usually 7 times, 3.5 minutes, works to get through all the commercials so I will quickly hit skip 7 times to get back to the show), that seems to be what triggered the freezup yesterday. I NEVER had any issues with my VIP722, had the same receiver for 10 years with no problems, same can't be said of my Hopper experience.

I am hesitant to call Tech support due to the fact I will be asked to restart everything all over again by unplugging, and it may work fine for a day or a week and then I will have to call them all over again, and spend another hour or so on the phone only to get the same results. It is frustrating.

Good evening, olds403. Even with it saying good there can be some other factors that may cause that issue. Do you happen to have multiple external hard drive plugged into the Hopper at the same time? I am sure that you may already be aware of this, but it never hurt to ask. The Hopper does need quite a bit of free air flow or it can over heat the hard drive cause that error message. We recommend having it at least have 4-inches away from any shelving walls are 4-6 inches away from other electronic, especially from ones known for generating a lot of heat. Is that already how your setup is?

As for the Wireless Joey, that definitely should be happening. As was mentioned it could be a MoCA issue or connectivity issue. The error code would normally help let us roughly what could be causing it. Do you recall what the error code was? - Caleb S

 

[olds403]

Hi Caleb, thank you for responding. I have two hard drives connected to the Hopper. The Hopper is sitting on top of the entertainment center (open air), behind the TV. There is free space all around the Hopper, the entertainment center is about 18 inches from the back wall.

I was having issues with the system due to incompatibility with my Arris cable modem (thanks HipKat) so I connected an ASUS router to the cable modem and made the ASUS router the internet access point for the Hopper system and only the Hopper system. That seems to be working ok now.

The errors I have been getting are 311 and 315 when the DVR starts acting up (DVR shows 100% full and shows no recorded content when it is actually there and it is really only 10% full, or it simply says DVR not available) and I have to reset everything to get it working again.

 

[DISH Support]

If you're willing, can you try unplugging the hard drives when you're not using them to see if this makes any difference on the messages you're getting on your Hopper? If you can contact our support teams at Request Rejected and they can put notes on your account regarding these errors to keep a record of the issues you're having, and they can also add you to the list of people affected by the wonky DVR percentage issue.

Yes, the tech teams will say restart when you're getting the 311, because the next and last step is to replace the receiver if resetting doesn't get rid of the error.

- Phoenix