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!
Comment from rm on August 26, 2006 at 1:48 AM
Dude, I'm in the same boat but my hardware seems fine. The Maxtor 40gb HD in it developed some bad sectors in the OS area. That makes 2 of 2 hard drives that I've had fail in the past 5 years that have been Maxtors.
Anyway, upgrading the hard drive (Seagate 400GB, never had one fail!) I seem to be on the right track. I tried downloading an image because the old drive had read errors and couldn't generate an image for RTVPatch, but I got the wrong one. According to a website I read, the other images have problems and need to be reset before use.
I'm currently waiting for the 250mb Factory reset image to download... Wish me luck!
Oh, and I almost forgot... I'll bet your ethernet port still works. I hope you haven't given up on ReplayTV after 6 months. It's worth the work,
Comment from Mike on September 9, 2007 at 8:38 PM
Hello.
My HDD just died right before I was able to make an image of it. I purchased a 320 GB Maxtor HDD and lo and behold, the 40GB (factory one) just gave up on me. Now I am not sure what to do. Where could I get an image for my machine (RTV 5504)
Ur help is greatly appreciated.
Thank you.
Mike