Please Help! Show List Cleaned Out...Using External

[SDCA]

I sincerely apologize if this is in the wrong area.

Here's my problem. I have had the seagate/esata connection working great since September.

Just now we went to watch a recorded show and as I hit play...it went right to "do you want to delete now". I then tried the same on other programs and it did the same each time.

I went into a panic and just rebooted the dvr. It went through it's whole process and then said it did a "winter update". Then....

All my programs are gone...it's completely clean.

What do I do now to get my programs back? Are my programs safe on the external? I haven't changed dvr's...it's the same one I've been using and it seems to work fine.

Help...I'm desparate and don't want to do something I'll regret before asking you guys for help.

Thanks for much in advance for any help.

[evan_s]

I see 2 posibilities.

1) it booted of the internal drive. If thats what happened Series links and other things should be reset too. Check the cables etc. Make sure the esata drive is powered on and ready before powering on the sat box.

2) the box detected some issue on the drive during the reboot and deleted everything on the section of the drive used to store the recording. The series links should still be there in this case. If this is what happened the recordings are all gone with no way to recover them.

[cover]

I know this is not what you want to hear, but one of mine completely reformatted my external drive for no apparent reason two or three months ago. Has been working fine with the same drive ever since then.

As previously suggested, make sure the external drive is powered and ready to go before you plug the DVR back in. That will make sure it's booting up the external drive and not the internal drive. Another way to test this would be to completely disconnect the external drive and let the DVR boot to the internal drive. Make a short recording on the internal drive so that you have a reference point in the list. Then reconnect the external drive and boot again. If the recording you made is not in the list, then you'll know it is using the external drive.

[SDCA]

I tried the above and some advice from another forum...and nothing worked. After 90 minutes and figuring it was all over...I searched out the original set-up and and figured why not go through the steps.

I told my wife I figured it was a 1 in 10 shot.

IT WORKED! EVERYTHING CAME RIGHT BACK TO WHERE IT WAS.

Thanks for posting and trying to help...it was appreciated.

[sbauer]

What exactly was / is the "original setup" steps? Turn dvr and drive off, plug drive into the esata port, turn drive on, turn dvr on ... is that what you did to solve your problem?

[SDCA]

What exactly was / is the "original setup" steps? Turn dvr and drive off, plug drive into the esata port, turn drive on, turn dvr on ... is that what you did to solve your problem?

I unplugged the dvr and the external drive (power and cable).

I then:

Plugged the external power in...waited about 5 minutes until it lit up.

Plugged the cable into the drive.

Plugged the cable into the dvr.

Plugged the dvr back in.

It then went through the rebooting process and everything came back just as it was before. I have no idea what happened but like I said...when the problem first started, I rebooted and it wiped everything out. I then followed the steps above...and everything came back.

It was strange because I poured over hundreds of posts looking for answers and I had hope that everything was still on my external because everyone said that it only reformats if hooked up to a new dvr.

Then I posted my problem and the responses were well intentioned...but gave me little hope.

I only did the above because I thought I had lost everything so why not go through the initial start up to begin anew...and who knows...?

Anyway...I hope someone benefits from my lucky lesson learned.