ILO DVDRHD04 Hard Drive issue (and guitarman question)

[Batchman]

I recently got one of these units, and for the most part, I love it.

But I capture television shows and then edit out commercials, and I have run into a problem as I was trying to remerge sections of one show into a single file ... system was suddenly freezing up all the time on that file and claiming to have some kind of drive problem with it.

At this point, I have the two files in question marked as bad, and in protect mode to be sure I don't accidentally delete them, on the off chance there is an actual drive problem, as opposed to only a file gone bad.

I have downloaded the latest firmware (April 25, I believe), and also the auto-tweak program from Guitarman's site, just because I think I would sometimes like to have the 3 hour speed available, and it wasn't showing up on my machine, even though the manual said I should have it.

So here's where I am at ... I am about ready to burn the firmware update and install it, but I have seen a note somewhere suggesting cleaning the hard drive ... how important is this in my situation? I have something like 40 hours of TV shows I have not yet gotten commercials edited out of.

Suppose I could burn them to 10 RW discs, and then just transfer them back over for editing after cleaning out the hard drive, but how needful is this likely to be?

Guitarman ... any word or hint of any problems with the latest firmware update and your auto-tweak thing?

Oh, and how can I tell if my unit is one that could really use holes drilled to prevent overheating?

Finally, after spending about 15 minutes per half-hour show removing commercials, I have to ask ... does anybody know of any DVD Recorders -or- any computer programs (if I transfer directly from DVD Recorder to computer) than can do a very good job of automating the commercial removal? Well, no harm in asking.

[Guitarman]

Batchman,

It is always good to back up any recordings on the HDD before doing a firmware update. Sometimes the update may be repairing issues with HDD functions and file structures, leaving the contents after the update, corrupt or uneditable. After the update, it is best to do a HDD erase command which will reformat and rewrite the file system to the drive. The best thing would be to backup the contents to DVD+RW's, do the update and then see if the contents is still intact and editable. If not, do the erase and restore from the DVD+RW's. Better to be safe!!

If you do not want to worry about hacking the firmware yourself, my site also has pre-hacked files.

Good luck and let me know how it turns out.

[Batchman]

All right ... I copied about 1/4 of the stuff I had taped off of the hard drive, but then other files (not all of them, but perhaps half) started going bad.

Files that had been fine, suddenly would no longer show any thumbnail, would not play, would not do anything.

So I gave up and erased everything. Wiped the drive two or three times, to give it as much chance to fix whatever had gone wrong as it could, reset to factory settings, did the hacked update, and started over again.

So more than 75% of what I have taped is now gone. If this happens again, I think I'll just take the blasted thing back. Why spent $250 to get just a few of the shows you wanted to record? Sheesh!

So any suggestions for the most stable ways to use the system? If you mainly want to use it to edit out commercials?

[zleepy]

Files that had been fine, suddenly would no longer show any thumbnail, would not play, would not do anything.

Same happened to me after I upped firmwares.
I went from 1193 to 1195 and everything was OK.
Next day, I changed to 1194 to see what it was like.
Everything worked fine for several days then some files won't play or copy to DVD.
Switched back to 1195 did not help but files stopped locking up.

Lesson learned - SAVE files to DVD before changing firmware!

[leebo]

Is it possible to remove the HD, connect it to a PC, and use a program to bring back "erased" files?