My first PVR721 Total F-up!

[Nightmare]

My 721 has been running fine for about 5 months now. I reboot it every week or whenever it seems to be pissy about recording. Well... Last night at 3 am I got up to let my dog out. I noticed the green power light was flashing. I held down the power button to reboot the machine. I went back to bed and when I got up this morning they screen said something about a HDD failure. I rebooted the maching and it started to "reformat" the HDD. Everything is gone now and it doesn't seem to want to let me change channels, its stuck on Channel 2. I had to leave for work, I will mess with it more when I get home.
I am a little pissed off that there is no easy way to "backup" the 60+ hours of shows I was saving.

How often does the HDD reformat itself? What is up with the system not changing channels?!

[Scott Greczkowski]

Sounds like it's time for a call to the advanced tech support. :)

Word of advice (for everyone with ANY PVR) buy a UPS and plug your PVR into it.

Let us know how you make out.

[Mark Lamutt]

Another piece of advice - don't try to reboot your receiver when the green light is flashing. That almost always ends up badly.

[STXJim]

I've noticed that my green power light doesn't blink (like my DP did).
Is this normal for a 721?

[Scott Greczkowski]

Yes its normal. :)

[mattmcg]

Originally posted by Nightmare
My 721 has been running fine for about 5 months now. I reboot it every week or whenever it seems to be pissy about recording. Well... Last night at 3 am I got up to let my dog out. I noticed the green power light was flashing. I held down the power button to reboot the machine. I went back to bed and when I got up this morning they screen said something about a HDD failure. I rebooted the maching and it started to "reformat" the HDD. Everything is gone now and it doesn't seem to want to let me change channels, its stuck on Channel 2. I had to leave for work, I will mess with it more when I get home.
I am a little pissed off that there is no easy way to "backup" the 60+ hours of shows I was saving.

How often does the HDD reformat itself? What is up with the system not changing channels?!

Why the heck would you need to reboot weekly? I don't believe you should reboot, just for the sake of rebooting. I've had my PVR721 since December and only had 1 reboot since it was installed (minus the software upgrades of course).

[greylar]

This has been mentioned before but its worth mentioning again. I have to reboot every 2-3 days because my guide doesn't update. I didn't used to have to do that but after one of the recent updates It started happening. Frankly I'm a little pissed about it!

Yes I only get the 3 day guide (119 only). So now I guess I will have to buy a dish pro dish just to get a stinking guide.

Greylar

[Adrian_R]

Originally posted by Mark Lamutt
Another piece of advice - don't try to reboot your receiver when the green light is flashing. That almost always ends up badly.

What is the 721 doing when the green light is blinking?

[DmitriA]

Originally posted by Adrian_R
What is the 721 doing when the green light is blinking?
It usually means that it is downloading the update. Don't know if that means that L1.10 is coming down - will check tonight...

[Bill R]

Originally posted by mattmcg
Why the heck would you need to reboot weekly? I don't believe you should reboot, just for the sake of rebooting.

Matt,

You are right, you should not need to reboot every week (if the software was perfect). When I called advanced tech support about how slow the menus were getting after I had my 721 for a couple of weeks the tech suggested a weekly reboot. It does clear up the slowness problem. Hopefully this will be fixed in a future software update but until it is, I'm going to do a weekly reboot as suggested by DISH.

[rickz]

Originally posted by DmitriA

It usually means that it is downloading the update. Don't know if that means that L1.10 is coming down - will check tonight...
Nope, it's still L1.09.  That's what came down last night after I hooked up my 721 for the first time.  Perhaps someone with inside intel will announce the L1.10 roll-out when its time is near.

Rick -Z-

 

[mgavin]

Nightmare,

Unplug the unit and then plug it in, after that you'll likely be able to change channels again - pressing the power button for 10 seconds forces a hardware reset but doesn't always seem to reset/clear everything.

[the_beaver]

dear nightmare...
based on both of my 721 sudden death experiences---in my opinion, i don't believe you should worry about all the guilt associated with things like: "oh gosh--i shouldn't have rebooted", or "maybe i shouldn't have touched that green blinking button" stuff...if a 721 is going to die it's going to die...
based on experience---when my first unit went belly up with the 'disc failure' message it was still capable of drawing in programming just no pvr utilities---when my second 721 receiver died it REALLY died---i couldn't even watch programming for longer than 30 minutes between reboots...
That leaves me with saying my 3rd receiver is hanging in there and doing fine---what is different now is that dish network had their installers come out and 'ground' my system properly (the original non-dish installation neglected to do this)...BUT bottom line IMHO is that if my 'cutting edge' receiver is going to crash it's going to happen because something EXTERNAL to is not working right not because i touched it at an opportune time...

[Jacob S]

It should NOT be having to be rebooted each week, the other 721's have not needed this that I have seen.

[BobMurdoch]

My 721 was hiccupping yesterday. It was super slow in pullijng up menus (it took several seconds.) Pulled smart card and speeded things up a little, but it was still sluggish. Turned off the main switch on my power strip, left off for 30 seconds and restarted. All back to normal now. Don't know what caused this hiccup, I have about 40 timers active, but I regularly empty out shows.

[Adrian_R]

Mine went weird last night too. It showed a 32 minute recording that when I tried to go into it displayed a "invalid recording" (paraphrasing; can't remember the actual error message) message. I rebooted the box and then I could go into the recording. Never did that to me before. I had two other recordings going on and was watching a third pre-recording.