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Well the DVD burner on my wife's Pioneer 533 finally bit the dust last month. I'm actually surprised it lasted that long given the number of discs she's burned over the last 4-1/2 years on it. It left me in a real dilemma as to what to do about it.
I've got a fairly large investment in Pioneer recorders (a 533, 633, two 640s and a 560), so a couple of years back I bought a service remote and made a donation to HKan's PioneerFAQ site in order to pick up the ID discs and service manuals needed to deal with repairs. But until now all of the units have worked flawlessly (well almost all - but the one that had a hard drive failure was still under warranty so it wasn't my problem).
My wife really, REALLY loves the TV Guide feature, so I grudgingly bit the bullet and coughed up the Cdn$225 for a new DVD burner. I'm very happy to report that the burner went in with no trouble, I was able to re-enter the CPRM ID with the service remote and reinitialize the unit with the ID disc without any problems. The only small hitch was that CPRM re-entry seems to reinitialize the TVGOS software so I had to re-enter all the settings and wait for the guide to repopulate.
That emboldened me to try something else - cloning the hard drive. The 533/633 are pretty notorious for being difficult to repair because of the TVGOS firmware, but I figured that if I was able to clone the entire hard drive BEFORE it failed then it ought to work OK. So I picked up a 160GB IDE drive and used a Fedora on an old computer system I had to bit-copy all of the blocks from the 80GB drive in the 533. My goal wasn't to make the drive larger, it was simply to get an identical clone so that there wouldn't be any complications.
The HDD replacement went just as smoothly as the burner replacement did. After entering the CPRM ID and using the ID disc, the recorder was operational and had all of the original recordings on it. The TVGOS software had to be re-initialized and the guide had to repopulate, but I already expected this from my experience with the DVD burner replacement.
The machine has been up and running for a few weeks now, and with a brand new burner and HDD it should hopefully last another 4-1/2 years (although whether or not we'll still be getting guide info then is another question).
Now I'm planning to buy a few more spare hard drives and make clones of the HDDs on my other recorders as insurance against eventual inevitable failure...
I've got a fairly large investment in Pioneer recorders (a 533, 633, two 640s and a 560), so a couple of years back I bought a service remote and made a donation to HKan's PioneerFAQ site in order to pick up the ID discs and service manuals needed to deal with repairs. But until now all of the units have worked flawlessly (well almost all - but the one that had a hard drive failure was still under warranty so it wasn't my problem).
My wife really, REALLY loves the TV Guide feature, so I grudgingly bit the bullet and coughed up the Cdn$225 for a new DVD burner. I'm very happy to report that the burner went in with no trouble, I was able to re-enter the CPRM ID with the service remote and reinitialize the unit with the ID disc without any problems. The only small hitch was that CPRM re-entry seems to reinitialize the TVGOS software so I had to re-enter all the settings and wait for the guide to repopulate.
That emboldened me to try something else - cloning the hard drive. The 533/633 are pretty notorious for being difficult to repair because of the TVGOS firmware, but I figured that if I was able to clone the entire hard drive BEFORE it failed then it ought to work OK. So I picked up a 160GB IDE drive and used a Fedora on an old computer system I had to bit-copy all of the blocks from the 80GB drive in the 533. My goal wasn't to make the drive larger, it was simply to get an identical clone so that there wouldn't be any complications.
The HDD replacement went just as smoothly as the burner replacement did. After entering the CPRM ID and using the ID disc, the recorder was operational and had all of the original recordings on it. The TVGOS software had to be re-initialized and the guide had to repopulate, but I already expected this from my experience with the DVD burner replacement.
The machine has been up and running for a few weeks now, and with a brand new burner and HDD it should hopefully last another 4-1/2 years (although whether or not we'll still be getting guide info then is another question).
Now I'm planning to buy a few more spare hard drives and make clones of the HDDs on my other recorders as insurance against eventual inevitable failure...