Panasonic DMR HS2 --- stops recording?

[Trollheart]

Hi all. Haven't been here for a long time.
My Panny has been working fine (apart from one or two times when I had to forcibly reformat, sadly), but just today it stopped recording for no reason. So I started it up again, same thing, and a third time. There's plenty of space left on the HDD, and weirdly, timer recordings work fine (so far!), but manual don't.
After checking what had been recorded via the Navigator, I see each truncated recording has a strange symbol, like a double box (you know like when you draw a 3D cube, and you draw one box slightly to the right of the other, then join them up with lines? This is like that, only without the lines), and the first box has what looks to be a wavy line going down the centre, vertically. At first, I thought it was the timer symbol, but I looked closer, and it ain't.
I've had this unit about 3 years now, and I know that's time enough for things to start going wrong (HDD recorders have already dropped to 10% of the price I paid for this, well 20% anyway), but is this indicative of the machine packing up preparatory to shuffling off to Silicon Heaven? Has anyone experienced this? As far as I can see, dubbing works ok too (fingers crossed), and I can get around the recording by setting timers, though on occasion the timer has failed to go off (that's been happening on a sporadic basis for the last 6 months to a year).
Any ideas?
Thanks for any input.
And Happy New Year to yez all!
Troll

[Stu Jordan]

The icon you describe indicates that the programme being recorded is copy protected. If you have your owners manual handy have a look a pages 39 & 46 (UK manual). If the HS2 detects any sort of copy protection signal (ie macrovision) it will stop recording.

[Trollheart]

Excellent! Thank you --- that clears it up.
Although I wonder why the prog was copy-protected? It was just a docuemtary on History Channel about King Herod --- hardly blockbuster movie material! Surely they're not going to start this, that you can't even record docuemntaries for viewing later??
Anyway, thanks for your reply.
Best
Troll