I bought my Showstopper in March of 2001 - it's had three separate (major) problems...
When I first purchased it, it was DOA (bad modem), and Panasonic sent me a new (well, refurbed
) unit under warranty.
Later, the OS somehow got corrupted and I was in the endless reboot cycle. Wiped the hard drive and used a fresh image, and it worked great.
Now, it's dead again. I was watching live TV and the video stuttered, then froze, accompanied by a few scraping noises from the unit. I couldn't do a soft reboot, and hard reboots resulted in the "Please wait a few moments" screen along with nothing but clicking noises from the hard drive. Did another hard reboot the next day and it booted up, and even played back recorded shows - but the channel guide data was all lost and a number of replay channels had been deleted. About 15 minutes later, the unit froze up again, scraping noises and all.
So the original 20GB Quantum hard drive is kaput.
Maybe I SHOULD have had the disk spindown disabled all this time. 
Thankfully, with the help Mikeyboy and a number of other people have given me on this forum, I'll swap in a hard drive from my old PC and I should have my Replay working again in no time.
I'm really glad this place is around! A dead HD becomes a minor annoyance instead of turning my Replay into a big paperweight. Thanks AVS!
When I first purchased it, it was DOA (bad modem), and Panasonic sent me a new (well, refurbed
Later, the OS somehow got corrupted and I was in the endless reboot cycle. Wiped the hard drive and used a fresh image, and it worked great.
Now, it's dead again. I was watching live TV and the video stuttered, then froze, accompanied by a few scraping noises from the unit. I couldn't do a soft reboot, and hard reboots resulted in the "Please wait a few moments" screen along with nothing but clicking noises from the hard drive. Did another hard reboot the next day and it booted up, and even played back recorded shows - but the channel guide data was all lost and a number of replay channels had been deleted. About 15 minutes later, the unit froze up again, scraping noises and all.
So the original 20GB Quantum hard drive is kaput.
Thankfully, with the help Mikeyboy and a number of other people have given me on this forum, I'll swap in a hard drive from my old PC and I should have my Replay working again in no time.
I'm really glad this place is around! A dead HD becomes a minor annoyance instead of turning my Replay into a big paperweight. Thanks AVS!