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
) 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!
