DVR has a mind of its own

[juppy]

Anybody here ever run into the problem of your DVR deleting recorded shows all by itself? Our box is a Dish Network 508 and for about the last 4 months or so it will randomly delete one recorded program off the hard drive all by itself. Very random though.....show type doesn't matter (movies, sitcoms, sports, whatever), might delete 1 show every couple days and might delete 1 every 2 weeks....no real pattern. I thought I had it figured out for awhile as it seemed to happen when I had to use the power button on the front of the unit to reboot it. But tonight I hadn't rebooted or recorded a single thing for two days and one of my recorded movies went bye-bye again. This happens even when I set their so-called "Protect" feature, which is supposed to keep shows from being deleted. That no workie either. Protected or not, if you leave a show on there for several days, there's a good chance you may not get to watch it before it gets whacked.

No, I haven't called Dish yet (don't relish the thought of being on hold for a half hour waiting for them to take my call) so thought I'd check here first and see if anybody else has had this problem or has any insight.

[glc]

How full is the hard drive?

[juppy]

Not even half full, g. It'll hold around 60 hours, but I rarely ever let it get more than about 15 to 20 hours worth of shows on it before I get 'em watched and delete 'em myself. For example, this last time, there was only one movie (an hour and 45 minutes long) and 2 one hour shows on there total. Nothing else. And the movie got deleted by the box, while leaving the other 2 shows.

[Hi Ho]

It could be the hard drive going bad. I am on my third VIP722. The first two suffered catastrophic hard drive failures which started with symptoms like you describe and ended with only the live TV portion of the DVR working.

I love Dish and their DVR interface is nice (MUCH nicer than Comcast)but they need to switch hard driver suppliers.

[juppy]

Well, this is our third box too, but only the second one actually failed. The first was a 501 and it had some kind of recall or something....ours was working fine however. They replaced it with a 508 which worked for, jeez, like 5 or 6 years probably. Then that one started having problems with the picture getting all these little green squares showing up on the tv shows we were watching live (not recorded). Then one day that blocky picture just froze like that and, well, that was it for that box. Had this third box for just over a year now and it only started doing its self-deleting stuff about mid December 2010. As for the hard drive manufacturer, this one has a Seagate in it.

Might have to call them (ugh!) and see if they've had this happen on some other boxes before. Hate to have to call them though because that usually ends up in problems. When the last box went out, they tried to charge me $279.99 because they said I didn't return the old box to them. I was like "What??!! I sent that box off and hour after I got the new box! Followed the UPS tracking number all the way to Texas and that's the last I saw of it." She kept arguing until I told her the exact city where the UPS shipment ended up and after that I guess she must have figured I had to have shipped it if I knew where it went. She says "Well, I'll believe you.....THIS TIME.....it's probably just one of our repair center guys not getting it logged in again. But just know that we only provide ONE box per year and you're pushing that." I figure my math must be terrible because if we've been with them since 2002 and only had 3 boxes total, one of which is THEIR own recall, I don't see how that makes "pushing it" on the 1 box a year limit.

[David M]

Do you have the DVR plugged into a phone outlet so the software can automatically update? I know with DirecTV I need to do this.

There is also DirecTV which in my experience do not have rude or idiot customer support people.

[juppy]

David M > No, there's no phone line plugged in to the box. The original installer said we didn't really need it anyway unless we were going to be purchasing PPV's, which we don't. As for updates, I was told one time when our last box had something messing up that they could send the updates via the satellite. Anyway, that's what she did.....she asked what version of the software I was using, so I told her, and she said she would "hit me" with an update, and shortly after that the version number changed on my screen and the problem was fixed. Dunno anything other than that of how they work; just going off of what they tell me (assuming they even know ).