Dish ViP 722k DVR hard drive problem (dead?)

[1983parrothead]

Okay. Let's start at the beginning:

* First, in September this year (2011), my father switched from Charter to Dish Network, and gave me a Dish ViP 722k DVR receiver without me requesting it.

* Few weeks after installing and using it, a hard drive failure occurred, but then went back to normal after I moved it from underneath a VCR / DVD combo to reduce overheating.

* Around two months later (last Sunday) after recording a large number of shows and other broadcasts (with having 5 hours of HD space left and around 33 hours of SD space left), another hard drive failure occurred. This time, I tried several methods to run the DVR again: unplugged for 10 seconds then plug; didn't work. Unplugged for more than 10 seconds ( 1 to more hours ); didn't work. Unplugged for 10 seconds or more after laying the DVR receiver sideways; didn't work.

* I called Dish Network's technical support employees, and they highly recommend me to replace it with a new one, because they assume that its hard drive is dead, and taking it to a data recovery center would be illegal. They also suggested me to buy an external hard drive with its own power source (like either a Western Digital (WD) or Hitachi (they pronounced it "Hibachi" as they recommend)) to backup the data in case if another hard drive failure occurs. But I would like to recover the data from the old DVR receiver and move them to the new one, because some recordings I have would never be seen again without me preserving it myself.

* Next, I researched for the most similar problems on the Internet, and found people saying things like:

** How come I still can record with a dead hard drive?

** After freezing my hard drive for 1 hour, it ran like new again, but only for a few minutes. After freezing it for an hour, it ran for 30 minutes.

** Freezing hard drives makes them worse. They'll run slower.

** If your DVR hard drive runs again, then that would be your chance to backup the data in an external hard drive.

** Am I hearing people say it's possible to backup data from a dead internal hard drive to an okay external hard drive?

** It is impossible to recover data from a dead hard drive. You might as well have to let it go.


I want to know what suggestion(s) you readers have?

[neomaine]

...
* Next, I researched for the most similar problems on the Internet, and found people saying things like:

** How come I still can record with a dead hard drive?

** After freezing my hard drive for 1 hour, it ran like new again, but only for a few minutes. After freezing it for 24 hours, it ran for 30 minutes.

** Freezing hard drives makes them worse. They'll run slower.

** If your DVR hard drive runs again, then that would be your chance to backup the data in an external hard drive.

** Am I hearing people say it's possible to backup data from an internal hard drive to an external hard drive?

** It is impossible to recover data from a dead hard drive. You might as well have to let it go.


I want to know what suggestion(s) you readers have?

- Recording after it's dead? Not likely, or, it was just a temp failure. Bad sector, then it gets remapped?
- Yes, freezing a hard drive can sometimes allow you to use it for a small period of time. YMMV - wildly.
- On the Dish DVRs where it's enabled (now a free feature) you can copy from the internal to an external drive.

Remember that the data on a Dish DVR is encrypted. The ONLY way to get it off the hard drive would be use the DVR's own copy function to get it to an external drive.

[jman98]

The position of Hollywood is that on the surface the DMCA would seem to make data recovery illegal, but a court would have to actually rule definitively on that and until or if that ever happens what Dish told you is just what the THINK rather than what the situation is with 100% certainty. A court could rule that the DMCA is not so broad as to prevent users from copying over recordings to a new drive in situations such as yours.

Strictly speaking it is NOT impossible backup from an internal drive to an external one nor to recover data from a dead drive, but as neomaine points out the recordings will be encrypted and a data recovery service might have issues with that part of it.

Freezing is NOT at all recommended as a permanent solution. It's meant to be used in desperate last ditch measures to TEMPORARILY make a failing drive stable enough to get stuff off it and onto a separate good drive. It's also meant to be used by people too cheap to pay a data recovery service and people who understand that doing this is NOT in any way a permanent solution and it may in fact make things worse. Freezing will probably make the drive worse but it may buy you one hour or several hours to quickly copy stuff off the drive when nothing else you've tried has been able to access the drive at all. A drive that has to be frozen to be accessed is not a salvageable drive. The clock is running on how long you've got to get stuff off of it without paying a recovery service.

[1983parrothead]

Hi again.

Before I decided to send back the old Dish ViP 722k DVR hard drive and used the new one, I attempted to freeze the old one in a chest freezer for a couple of hours, and when I re-installed it, it brought up a pop-up window that told me it has to warm up at least approx. 40°F (4.444444444444445°C). After that, not only the hard drive still failed to run, but the remote control couldn't scroll nor control the receiver. While my father sent the old one, I installed the new one and laid it sideways to have more cold air for preventing heat-based hard drive failures.

To make things worse by accident, here is what I did later: while I waited til Christmas to have one of the hard drives Dish Network suggests, which was a Western Digital (WD) brand 1 terabyte (TB) external hard drive to backup data from the internal hard drive, I was going to start recording with a DVD recorder, but after a couple of days, I decided to record with the new DVR. A few days after Christmas, I backed up the data that was on the 1 TB external hard drive before I installed it. I was worried that upcoming television programs and advertisements would soon show up, while my new DVR's internal hard drive might unexpectedly fail. When it told me that it will delete all existing data from the "device" before reformatting it and restarting the receiver, and asked me if I am sure I would like to do this, I selected "Yes", and after a few minutes of reformatting and restarting, I typed the "DVR" button and scrolled to "My Recordings", and nearly every recording I had were either missing or deleted. I thought when it said "device", it only meant the external hard drive and not the internal one.

Another several hours of data accidentally destroyed. )-:<