GEOSATpro DVR blue screen?

[Corrado]

I went to play back some recorded programs I had on my EHD connected to my microHD yesterday and found all recordings previous to November do not play. When selecting any of them the small preview screen is just blue, and if play is selected it appears to be fast forwarding on a blue screen.

If the drive is connected to the PC they still play fine without issue.

Thinking back, all these recordings were made with the previous FW before updating to the current. Recordings made in the past several weeks play fine.

EHD is a powered Rosewill external enclosure with a WD 160gb drive with has until now operated without a glitch.

Any ideas?

 

[SatelliteAV]

Don't beleive that this is related to a recent firmware upgrade, but rather an indexing problem on the drive.

I observed this several months ago when attempting to view a few recordings made with original factory firmware dated 8.29.2012. Connected the drive to the PC and ran a disk repair program. This successfully restored playback of these files.

 

[primestar31]

I agree with Brian, and want to add this: Don't just pull the USB cord when you want to swap the drive to another machine. You should go into the Micro's menu, and do a proper Eject.

If not, I'll bet it can cause indexing issues on a drive, especially if the cord is pulled while it's writing anything to it right then.

P.S. This is ALWAYS true of ejecting any data device even from a pc. Either power down the machine before, or do an Eject.

 

[Corrado]

Update. I sometimes use a USB flash drive for quick 30 minute time shifting tool instead of the EHD and discovered it has the same exact issue with anything recorded prior to Nov.

I do not always have anything connected to the USB unless a recording is planned and always safely remove any connected USB device.

Nothing was really lost as almost all recordings were already watched and can just be deleted. Not really worth the time to recover except for the learning experience of what to do in these cases out of curiosity.

The only other event was the boot loop issue that I needed to recover from and both devices may have been plugged in at some point during that learning curve.

 

[pacificrim]

MicroHD DVR Bluescreen

Me too!

I just noticed that most of my DVR recordings are Bluescreening. They play on a PC, but only show a blue screen when scrolling through or playing on the MicroHD. This happened before on another harddrive. I always disconnect from software before unplugging.
A couple of points:
1) it doesn't seem to affect PBS HD recordings
2) a harddrive verify/repair found no problems

Any ideas?

 

[northgeorgia]

My experiences with the hard drive, echo exactly what Brian and primestar have said. For resolving both the blue screen PVR and the "limit CAN not record" issues, do the following if you are using Windows 7:

1. Connect your hard drive to your PC.
2. Open "Computer" from the start menu (Bottom left hand corner "window" icon, second column on popup).
3. RIGHT click the drive that you connected.
4. Select Properties.
5. Click the Tools tab.
6. Run an error check first (top section) and be sure "Automatically fix file system errors" is selected on the next menu.
7. After this, select DEFRAGMENTATION (second menu option).
8. Select your drive and click "Analyze Disk." The time this takes will vary.
9. If there is even 1% fragmentation, go ahead and click "Defragment disk."
10. Close out all menus except for the Computer window that you opened in step 2.
11. You should be able to right click the drive again and select "Eject." If not, disconnect safely via the lower right hand USB menu "Safely remove hardware."
12. Give it a few extra seconds after you receive the "Safe to remove" message to allow to drive to stop spinning.
13. Reconnect drive to your STB.

Give these steps a try after you rescue what you want from the drive. Be sure to avoid pulling out the drive improperly from either the computer or STB, of powering off the STB during a recording, or [and this is just in my experience] deleting multiple recordings from the PVR on the STB or Computer without running error check/defragmentation. (I've learned to keep everything on disk until I'm ready to download "keepers" to my PC/other hard drive. After that, I wipe the drive for the STB clean by deleting all the recordings, doing the error check, and defragmenting before reconnecting it to the STB). Annoying procedure, but it's worked for me and has kept both playback and recording ready at any moment

 

[pacificrim]

Thanks for the input though I'm not sure that is the problem. I copied 2 files that wouldn't play to another drive's Ali folder and they still don't play. It might be time to ditch the MicroHD for something better.

 

[northgeorgia]

I also forgot to mention that I first did a full format of the drive because I had previously used it as a external hard drive for my PC.

 

[Corrado]

I was glad I never deleted all the recordings that the microHD blue screens. My X2 receiver plays them perfectly.

 

[primestar31]

I wonder if these "blue screen" recordings you are talking about are caused by changing your resolution or aspect settings in the MicroHD after they were recorded, and after you loaded a new firmware? Some odd attribute that got attached to the recordings?

Perhaps playing with those video settings in the Micro's menu might "fix them"? Not that I believe that would be a good solution, but it would be an interesting diagnosis if it works to fix them...

 

[pacificrim]

I haven't changed anything on it in a long time - before this drive was plugged in for sure, and it affected most recordings, sd or hd. It might have happened as the drive neared capacity. It got to about 90%, but I don't know if the problem occurred before then or not. I only noticed it when I went to watch something and got the blue screen. That drive was formatted FAT32 out of the box, so it may have become messed up as the drive telemetry gets messy when you are talking about very, very large drives (1TB). FAT32 was designed for much smaller drives.