Death Rattle?

[Bogey62]

I was attempting to erase a program from my 721 yesterday and the screen froze while redrawing the box that asks you if you want to erase the program (yes/no). There was a rather loud clunking noise coming from the unit every few seconds, so I rebooted and, to my shock, the hard drive had to install the OS again and proceeded to wipe everything I had recorded on the hard drive!

Thanks, Dish, now I just lost about 80 hours of recordings! No warning, no attempt to save anything, just erase it. Maybe M$ had a hand in writing the Dish 721's OS? :)

The noise seemed to stop after all this, but am I in for future troubles now?

[Jacob S]

Out of all the PVR's and the troubles with them I have had I have never experienced the clunking you describe but have heard the hard drive working in which can make some noise like a computer and hear of others having this issue. Did it sound like a hard drive working on a computer? Maybe it was loud because of all the work it was doing deleting all the shows off the hard drive or reformatting or something. It should not have deleted all the programs though. If it did it again I would have it returned. How long have you had the receiver?

[Bogey62]

Out of all the PVR's and the troubles with them I have had I have never experienced the clunking you describe but have heard the hard drive working in which can make some noise like a computer and hear of others having this issue. Did it sound like a hard drive working on a computer? Maybe it was loud because of all the work it was doing deleting all the shows off the hard drive or reformatting or something. It should not have deleted all the programs though. If it did it again I would have it returned. How long have you had the receiver?

No, it wasn't the normal hard drive noise, this was loud and sounded like a physical defect happening in the HD. I've never heard this noise and it wouldn't stop until I did the hard reboot of the unit, which then proceeded to format the entire HD.

I've had the unit less than one year, but I'm hesitant to send it in because I don't really want someone else's refurbished unit as a replacement if I can possibly avoid it.

[Neil Derryberry]

What you heard was most likely the actuator arm that holds the read/write heads being forced to end of travel, causing the arm to hit a little metal stop. That hard disk is bad, and this will probably happen to you again until you get the unit replaced.

Shipping hard drives is always a risky proposition, especially if they are mounted in a chassis. Best way to ship hard drives is by wrapping them in a lot of foam.

[Bogey62]

What you heard was most likely the actuator arm that holds the read/write heads being forced to end of travel, causing the arm to hit a little metal stop. That hard disk is bad, and this will probably happen to you again until you get the unit replaced.

Shipping hard drives is always a risky proposition, especially if they are mounted in a chassis. Best way to ship hard drives is by wrapping them in a lot of foam.

I don't see why I can't just open the unit and replace the hard drive myself -- I mean, how "special" can the hard drive be that Dish uses as compared to any other computer hard drive? As long as you have the proper storage space on the replacement drive and you make sure it's either SCSI or IDE (depending on what Dish used), where's the problem? Doesn't the unit format and reinstall the software upon initial bootup anyways?

[Neil Derryberry]

it isn't that the drive is special... it is "married" to the receiver, so a new drive won't work.

FYI... no posting about un-marrying receivers will be tolerated, if it can even be done.

[Jacob S]

This is why I have said before that its probably just better to either get an external or internal hardrive for a computer and use the computer as a pvr so that way you can do upgrades, have more and better features, and better reliability and save your recordings. Its a lot more flexible. This is what I may do in the future. Is there any particular forums on the internet that I can read about computer pvr's?