Please help me recover from an HR54 meltdown

I have an HR54-700 with a 4TB Western Digital Purple external drive in an eSATA enclosure. The enclosure has two LED’s, a blue one indicting that the drive is powered on, and a red one indicating drive activity. Current hard drive usage is less than 10% (over 90% free space).

Starting yesterday, I started experiencing intermittent HR54 freezes where the remote becomes completely unresponsive, and the video and audio freezes. When this happens, I notice that the red activity indicator LED on the enclosure is solid red. After several seconds, the DVR in-freezes, audio and video resumes, the remote is responsive, and the red LED indicator is back to normal blinking.

Also, overnight I received several alerts from my network monitor that the HR54 had re-booted. It re-booted again today while I was watching something on my AppleTV.

Troubleshooting:

- I ran the boot-up diagnostics “Full SMART test”, and the test was successful.
- I checked the drive enclosure, and it was barely warm to the touch.
- I checked the eSATA connection to make sure it was secure.
- I ran a CLEARMYBOX.

After all this, still no joy—random unresponsiveness and lockup’s, always associated with a constant red LED drive activity indicator.

Does this look like a drive failure? I could easily swap out the drive for a new one because I don’t have any recordings that can’t be recovered through on-demand. Or does it sound like a HR54 hardware issue? Any advice would be appreciated!

 

Holy Moses! What does a CLEARMYBOX actually erase? Seems like all my Seasons Passes are gone. I wasn’t expecting this. Meltdown is an understatement.

 

Well, my Series Manager list has zero entries. Perhaps you are mistaken? I don’t suspect the Seasons Passes are going to magically re-appear as the guide data re-populates.

I am still hoping for opinions WRT whether I should swap out my hard drive to address the issue of the DVR freezing up. I don’t want to re-enter Seasons Passes until I know whether to replace the drive.

 

Well, all I can report is what I see, and the Series Manager is now empty.

Update on the DVR freezing issue:

I decided to re-boot the DVR after disconnecting the external eSATA drive, which will revert the DVR to its internal drive. After re-booting successfully, the DVR seems to be working normally when using the internal drive. I will probably keep it in this configuration before I purchase a replacement 4TB drive to ensure it is really working properly.

I still don’t understand how the drive could pass the full SMART test if it is indeed faulty.

 

Well, the Series Manager list was showing as empty before I disconnected the external drive. Of course, nothing is on the internal drive, but the purpose of switching to the internal drive was to see if the external drive was causing the freeze-up issues. So far, the DVR operation with the internal drive has been flawless.

 

So you are suggesting that a failing drive, rather than the CLEARMYBOX, deleted my Series Manager list? Maybe, but I have grown weary of discussing it.

 

I have been running now for approx 24 hours using the original internal drive. I have made a number of recordings, and have been watching quite a bit of live TV. The DVR is performing flawlessly, and the remote has not frozen up. And no spontaneous re-boots. This seems to definitely point to my 4TB Western Digital Purple hard drive as being the cause of my issues. Shame, because it was only 24 months old.

I am about to order a replacement drive over the Internet. For some reason, my local Best Buy has only a consumer-grade 4TB drive, which I don’t want to use, and my local Fry’s hard drive shelves were literally bare yesterday. Of course, there is a chance that it is my external drive enclosure that is faulty, but I don’t know how to test that out without placing a new drive in it.

 

Interesting article, and thanks for sharing. I would hope that DTV would somehow notify customers if they roll out a SW update that immediately renders the eSATA drive inoperable. I would hate to be completely functional one day, and dead in the water the next. Regardless, I don’t think this is the root cause of the issues I reported earlier in this thread—the drive was still working, but with intermittent failures.

Two quick questions:

1. What is the capacity of the HR54 internal drive that I am using now? I don’t recall.
2. With previous generations of DVR’s, I replaced the internal drive with a larger capacity drive. Can the HR54 internal drive be swapped out as well and, if so, is there a thread that discusses the procedure? For owned equipment, of course...