DVR650 Pioneer DVD recorder shows zero hours remaining

[jackdup]

This recorder has a 250 GB hard drive and for some time every time I turn it on it tells me the HDD needs to be optimized. When I try to optimize it it starts out okay and says there is 559 minutes remaining to complete optimization and then in about 2 minutes it says 0 minutes remaining and then comes up and says that optimization was not completed and to run it again, however the same thing happens everytime. The hard drive is almost full so I thought perhaps it needed more space in order to do the optimization. I was writing stuff to DVDs in order to erase some stuff from the HDD and had about 14 hours remaining on the HDD. I took a few more things off and now it shows zero hours remaining and no matter how much I erase from the HDD it says zero hours remiaining.

Has anyone experienced this before or have a solution for it. There should be about 20 hours remaining on it right now based on what I erased. It won't let me record anything as it shows zero hours remaining even though I know there is at least 20 hours free.

Thanks

[wabjxo]

Not sure if you started offloading based on last-in first-out, but you could try offloading the very last thing recorded, then proceed to the next-last, etc., which should (hopefully) free up blocks of space in an ordely fashion.

The only unknown is the effect of an aborted defrag (optimize), which might have placed/located some stuff in temporary space or the cache that it intended to move later, but ran out of room?

[jackdup]

Well I have now erased about 40 hours of stuff and it still shows zero hours remaining.

[wabjxo]

Have you tried turning the unit off, then back on and see if that "resets" the counter.

I also assume you mean 40 hours at SP rec mode, which should be enough to try another optimize (if you haven't already)?

[jackdup]

I tried off and on and also the reset mentioned in the manual. I also tried unplugging it for a couple of minutes and when I plugged it in again I had to reset all of my settings. It came up and said repairing hard drive however still showed zero hours remaining. I kept erasing stuff and all of a sudden it showed 19 hours remaining. Then I erased another movie that was about 95 minutes in length and the time remaining jumped to over 40 hours and one more item erased and I know have about 50 hours free which sounds about right.

I have no idea why this happened as I have had the hard drive completely full on a few occasions and never had a problem like this.

THanks to those that replied and the suggestions.