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Vip722 Hard Drive Corrupted - All Recorded Show GONE

kosar

Member
Original poster
Oct 6, 2008
10
0
I have to vent about this because I am extremely infuriated about it. I wake up this morning to find the banner screen locked on both TV's that my VIP722 is connected to. I restart the Vip722, and when it comes back, it tells me that the hard drive is corrupted and that it has to clean everything off! After I called Dish for any other alternative, I had to FIGHT with them to send me another unit because they said it would have to happen again for them to send a replacement. ARE YOU KIDDING ME?? After talking to 4 other people, I finally had them send me another one. This thing was almost full with shows, and now they're all gone. Also, since the "clean up" of the hard drive, it won't record ANYTHING now. When I press the DVR button on my remote, it says that feature is not available (data not available). Also, I can't pause live TV.



Interesting, Dish support told me I should be turning off my DVR every night. Are people doing this?!? I made it a point to tell them them no one has ever told me this, and if it is that important to do to prevent hard drive corruption, they need to do LOT better job of communicating that. No one ever told me that. Personally, I think it's ridiculous. My Tivo has been one for literally YEARS, and the only way to turn the Tivo off is to unplug it.

Sorry for the long rant. Thanks.
 
You CAN'T turn off a dvr, only unplug it. Dish CSRs are less than knowledgeable for the most part. Today's dirt cheap hard drive market has about a 25% failure rate.

That said, I would be angry if I lost a drive full of programming too. This is why I am moving toward watching much less tv and just buying the dvd sets for shows I like and watch them at my leisure. Sure I'm a year behind that way but I won't be a hostage of the show schedule or Dish Network.
 
I agree 8bit. The "important" ones I'll buy on DVD. However, what's the point of a DVR if it is going to pull this crap? I'm still boiling about having to fight to get a replacement.

What an ordeal. I wonder how this "replacement" will go.
 
I had that message on my 622 once, too. I did a soft reset and it took care of the problem. One time the message came up after doing a reset, so I reset it again and it was fine.
 
Thanks, Jeremy. How did you do a "soft reset"? I held down the power button. What kind of reset is that?

Thanks!
 
Wouldn't pulling the power cord be a "hard" reboot? Thanks again.
 
Wouldn't pulling the power cord be a "hard" reboot? Thanks again.

The power button hold and pulling the cord do the same thing so I call them the same thing. Not sure there is a soft reboot on a Dish DVR.
 
I know it doesn't help you this time, but in the future you could make a USB external drive backup of the content on your 722.
 
Right. I know about the external USB, but is that a backup, or just more storage? A true backup would be the same content on the DVR drive as the external drive, and I thought the purpose of the external drive was for more storage. I would think the external drive could just as easily be corrupted, since it would be the same operating system and file structure.
 
If your DVR will not even pause, then it sounds like your hard drive simply went bad, as someone mentioned, a certain percentage of drives go bad.

Dish cannot allow backups in the sense of copies, because Hollywood will not allow it.

But there is sometimes a way around that. With dual tuner DVRs and multiple DVRs, you can often make two different recordings.

For example, if a great classic movie is being shown in HD, then I record it twice, and transfer each to two different external USB drives.

Most things are repeated - for example, HBO not only has HBO-East and HBO-West (which is the same thing 3 hours later), but they also repeat things frequently as well.

5-10 years from now, hard drives will be made from Flash Memory, and we won't have this problem, but for now, we have to live with it.
 
Right. I guess my point was that I'm not sure if an external hard drive would've saved me here. It's possible I guess, if the physical drive inside the DVR was the cuprit, but the external remained intact.

That leads to some questions. Can you easily remove the external drive and plug it into another VIP722 with ease? Also, do you have to let a program record to the internal DVR first, then move it to the external?

Thanks!
 
Thanks kstuart. I guess I need to watch these programs quicker since I can't rely on quality.
 
We had the same thing happen Monday Morning (I am writing this after midnight). Parents woke up and reported that there was an error message at 5 am. I wonder if there is bad software spooling or something???

Geoff
 
It was bad HDD, not a software.
Not sure what came of the OP's DVR, but I can update ours. After all programs were deleted (and timers), we continued with our day. Had 5 programs record on Monday and when we woke up this morning, DVR would not power on at all. After spending more than a 1/2 hour on the phone with a CSR, it was decided that they would send us a new DVR (and we wouldn't have to pay shipping or anything-I was ready to yell if they tried, but they didn't). So I have no idea why it would have died less than 96 hours after it was installed.

Geoff