Our ReplayTV Has Died!

Sunday afternoon, Sherree discovered that pressing the "Guide" button that displays the shows recorded on our ReplayTV wasn't working right. The guide would never come up and after a few minutes the unit would reboot itself. Not a good thing!

I tried disconnecting power and letting it boot cold, but that didn't help. I tried getting to the Guide through the setup menu, but that didn't work either. Some quick Googling didn't reveal anything particularly helpful, and the only thing I could see to try was do a factory reset, however that would lose all of our recorded shows (including several hours of Olympics and the two most recent episodes of Battlestar Galactica)!

It's important that I mention that one of the times I was in the setup menu, I noticed that it hadn't updated the Channel Guide data the past four nights. Missing one night isn't unusual, and even two isn't a big deal. Since the ReplayTV only tracks seven days of data, though, missing four nights is significant.

Anyway, rather than factory reset the hard drives in the Replay, I decided to format an extra drive with the Replay image and try to start up with that. With rtvpatch I was able to format that extra drive with the Replay software, drop it into the Replay box, and reconnect everything. It started up, the Guide worked, and was ready to be completely set up again!

The first thing the ReplayTV needs to know is where to dial for Channel Guide data. I plugged in that information, told it to get started and... nothing! The ReplayTV complained that there was no dial tone. A little more troubleshooting showed me that the phone line was working fine. That means the modem in the Replay is broken--which also explains why the past four nights' data wasn't updated.

So, our ReplayTV unit is dead. Since Sunday night we've been watching TV real-time (something we almost never do anymore), and I must say, it's horrible! I don't know how people without a DVR can do it!