622 reboots when trying to access Ext. HD

[guillermopelotas]

We have this wonderful new problem on our 622. When we try to access the external HD, it sits there for a few minutes, then it reboots the system. Pretty much every time now.

It's a 500GB MyBook Essentials, and it had been working fine since August '07. Then we found that if we went to delete items, it would pretend like it was going to, but it would not actually delete them. Odd thing is that it seemed to work somehow if we used TV2.

We also had this weird problem that if you pressed pause, the play button wouldn't work...you had to press the FF button to get it going before the play would work again.

What does that tell me? That there MAY be a problem with the hard drive, but overall, the 622 has some quirks.

There were about 250 items over 450 GB on that...anyone have any suggestions?

Thanks,

[Ken Green]

Have you done a power-cord reset?

[ChuckA]

That's a power cord reset on the receiver, not the EHD. Although, I would actually do both.

[guillermopelotas]

That's a power cord reset on the receiver, not the EHD. Although, I would actually do both.

Done both, actually. No luck... :(

I was already fearing the worst when I first had the "pretending to delete" incident a couple of weeks ago, figuring something could be wrong with the way it's writing to the drive. But I hadn't seen any other signs of issues (other than the "pretend" problem right before it happened again).

Talking with advanced technical support, which is still about 75% not-advanced people from my experienced, they suggested that I can't see anything on the hard drive on the 622 or a computer, I might want to return the hard drive. I reminded her that it did work fine before, and that a hard drive usually is just doing what the OS is telling it to do. She said that she didn't have much training in hard drives, and that nobody there did.

I get it…they can't be responsible for troubleshooting all equipment, but the odds of something like this happening only to me with no previous history are pretty slim. It's a little disappointing that they wouldn't be interested in seeing what's going on, if they didn't know of this problem, to maybe ensure that it doesn't happen to anyone else. And if they're charging us for the ability to use it, "that's not our equipment," so we have no idea is a pretty crappy response.

Anyway, my guess is that some glitch caused something to not write or overwrite, and it screwed up an FAT or something somewhere, and now the unit has no idea what to do about it. So of course instead of gracefully giving a message, it reboots.

So with no obvious error correction or way to recover my data because it's a proprietary format, I'm kind of screwed unless someone has a hidden gem that will fix things magically.

Any hocus pocus anyone? :)

[phrelin]

Any hocus pocus anyone?
I'd try posting the problem at http://tech.groups.yahoo.com/group/DISH-VIP-USB-HD/ but I don't hold out alot of hope for you recovering recorded programming.