One of my two DirecTV DVR receivers must have died overnight. When I opened the tv cabinet this morning, I smelled that burned-electronics smell you get after something like a power supply has burned out. Unfortunately, there was a huge amount of un-viewed movies (some of them pretty rare) and other good stuff on the hard drive. Since the contents are encrypted and in a special format, the only way I know of to have transferred it off of there (past tense) was by making a standard def copy -- item by item -- to my Pioneer DVDR. And now that door seems to be closed.

To make matters worse, this was the one of the two DirecTV DVRs that would still allow such xfers, without the spontaneous reboot problems I think are due to firmware changes from DirecTV.

In a prior VH thread, I was advised that the lifespan of these receivers was around 4 years of steady use. I got well under 3 out of this one.

Assuming it was not the HDD that died (a fan keeps spinning intermittently, but the receiver itself seems to be dead), is their NO way to offload or preserve the HDD contents ? I'm hoping against hope that someone who has been there and seen this has some good ideas.