I noticed mine was starting to over the last few months. Since i bought mine outright refurbished a few years back and the warranty was non-existent i had no qualms ripping it open and trying to diagnose it myself. Some research on the internet suggested replacing the coaxial cable and hard resetting the unit.
These initially helped - but for maybe 10 or 15 minutes. All signs pointed to a failing hard drive. I opened it up to find a standard Seagate Sata drive. Replacing it didn't work. The unit hung up on boot up suggesting that there was some boot data needed on the actual hard drive to make the unit operate.
- I grabbed a very good hard disk cloning utility, put the PVR drive into a spare PC and took an image of the existing drive.
- Next I grabbed a similar sized drive and swapped it into the spare pc and ran the disk cloning software again. I blew out any partitions and data on the replacement drive and restored the image to it.
- Amazingly - there was 7 partitions - a few Linux swap partitions, an MBR and then the bulk partition of un-allocated space - presumably where the actual recordings go. I put the newly re-imaged drive into the PVR and it booted
A short time later I got my cable subscribers default navigation screens and I was in business. The process didn't restore any of my old recordings - but I was fine with that.
I watched live TV - specifically hockey for almost an hour and so far no glitches!
Hope this helps someone. I spent too much time on the phones with little help. So - if you're having issues with your PVR - you may buy yourself some time by cloning your hard drive and replacing it.
