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ReplayTV 5504 Incorrect Hours remain

257 Views 3 Replies 3 Participants Last post by adone36, May 18, 2006

bobthib

Discussion Starter · May 16, 2006

I have a ReplayTV 5504 which I upgraded to 200 hours about a year ago. When it was first installed it reported about 187 hours (there was some on the stock 40 gig I mirrored from). The upgrade went flawlessly and the unit has been working fine. Until today!

My wife was watching a show when the unit went into a "Please Wait..." reset loop. It did that for 20 min and pressing and holding the power button didn't help.

I googled the problem and found some posts that discussed the problem. They suggested that the problem could be a) a full mpeg directory, b) a corrupt file structure, or c) a defective hard drive. One suggested that I disconnect all inputs and outputs except for power and s-video. If the reset is successful, the problem was a full MPEG directory and you need to delete some files.

I did that and tried the reset again, to no avail. I finally disconnected the power for 10 min with all the other in and out puts disconnected and then plugged it back in. It did a reset OK and came back on. I immedietly deleted about 50 hours of Sponge Bob cartoons. Before I did that it reported 78 hours left. After that it reported 87 hours. Now I never learned the "new math" but 78 plus 50 should be higher than 87.

That made me suspicious, so my wife and I went thought the Replay Guide and added up all the recorded shows. It came out to 75.5 hours. If that's true, then there should be about 200 - 75.5 or about 125 hours left.

SOOOOOOO, who can I get back that missing 50 hours? Perhaps the hard drive is failing? Is there any way to test it "in situ?"

Thanks for your thoughts and ideas.

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nded

· #2 · May 17, 2006

What is your default recording setting - Standard, Medium, or High?

Did you account for different show quality settings in you calculations?

If all the shows are not guaranteed (i.e. keep until I delete), the calculations can get really funky. If you have a number of shows that are "delete if space is needed", you may never get a handle on it.

I suggest you try DVArchive to see what it reports. At the same time, you can offload some of your shows to network based storage.

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bobthib

Discussion Starter · #3 · May 18, 2006

Thanks for the questions and thoughts. All the recordings are at "low quality" and take up about 1 gig /hr. I do have DV Archive, and it reports the same amount of space available as the Replay. I haven't gone though and added up the recorded shows as reported by DV, I'll have to do that and see if it jives with what is reported by Replay.

Most of our movies are recorded as "Keep until I delete", but some of my wife's soaps may be space available since she watches them in a day or two.

In reality there is nothing super critical. Most of the movies are my grandsons and we have the DVD's so we can put them back if we need to. I'm just concerned that if I have a drive going bad, is there any easy way to diagnose it, and replace it in advance.

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adone36

· #4 · May 18, 2006

A bad drive has no effect on the time remaining display. You are simply not accounting for the space you have reserved, what is already recorded and true size of the drive in bytes.

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