I have a Pioneer DVR-531H-S that has worked mostly without problems for the last two years. The EPG would sometimes stop pulling in listings, so I've had to reset the EPG a handful of times with the 753159852 etc method. That always worked. Now all of a sudden, the TV Guide has mostly gone black with some random pixels. Despite not being able to hardly see anything, I managed to do another EPG reset, which didn't fix it. Then I tried a complete reset using the stop and on/standby method. Now the TV Guide won't come up at all. The display on the DVR changes, as if the TV Guide has come up, but nothing changes on screen. Pressing the Timer Rec button does the same thing. I tried a blind reset using Sean Nelson's method described here: avsforum.com/avs-vb/showthread.php?t=972246 . It never seemed to take, which I'm guessing because the DVR didn't turn itself off and back on like the other EPG resets I've done. Manually turning it off and on didn't help. Doing another complete reset didn't help. The only other option I haven't tried yet is to do an optimize of the hard drive. I don't want to do that until I get confirmation from someone that I'm not going to screw it up further and/or lose my recorded TV shows.
If a simple optimize won't fix it, is there anything else to try or is the EPG dead? I'm willing to pull the hard drive and hook it up to Windows, flash the firmware, or anything else I can do myself at home. I don't want to spend any money trying to fix it. If it's dead and I have to spend money, I'm just going to replace it with a TiVo from eBay with a lifetime subscription. Any ideas?
[poo]
If a simple optimize won't fix it, is there anything else to try or is the EPG dead? I'm willing to pull the hard drive and hook it up to Windows, flash the firmware, or anything else I can do myself at home. I don't want to spend any money trying to fix it. If it's dead and I have to spend money, I'm just going to replace it with a TiVo from eBay with a lifetime subscription. Any ideas?
[poo]