Expressvu PVR issue

[Ed Goldstein]

I've got an interesting issue on my ancient Expressvu 5100 PVR, which apparently has a dead hard drive (024 error when accessing "My Recordings"). I don't really care about the PVR anymore, but I've noticed that I can't seem to get a successful Program Guide download - the progress bar never even starts. I've got a good signal and two other non-PVR receivers without this issue. Would a bad PVR drive prevent a program guide download? (I get program guide info on the screen, but not more than a day or less.)

I started going down this rabbit hole while trying to figure out why WGN (Channel 295) doesn't show up on the PVR receiver but it does on the other two. (I've rebooted and synchronized to no avail.) Anyway, if I need to get a new receiver, I'm willing to do that. But are there any decent PVRs out there? I only receive a signal on Nimiq 91 so I don't need anything fancy. Any advice would be appreciated.

 

[Claude Greiner]

I think the 1 day guide loads to the memory and the 9 day guide to the hard drive.

I forget the procedure but I think you can install a new drive and it should format

 

[harshness]

If the 5100 is still very much like the 5xx series of DISH DVRs, there is a short list of hard drive model numbers that will work and they must be pre-formatted.

 

[Ed Goldstein]

I'll track down another drive - somehow. Can someone let me know how it should be formatted?

 

[TheKrell]

Very vague recollection, but... I thought the receiver could be tricked into formatting the disk itself. Maybe the Yahoo group dishmod?

 

[harshness]

Finding a compatible drive will likely be difficult and relatively expensive. You may have to find a DVR that still has a working hard drive but it's not very reassuring to know that you're putting in a drive that may not have much life left. There's also no guarantee that a DVR that you acquire has the same drive as yours as there were a dozen or so drives on the list.

From the messages I saved, the DISH 510 had to have an effectively identical drive (brand and model with a certain range of serial numbers) or the DVR itself had to be flashed to a factory setting to accept another drive from the short list and the replacement drive had to have a couple of "magic sectors" placed on it.

It was about 13-1/2 years ago when someone last asked here on satelliteguys how to replace a 510 hard drive. The last post from the DISHMod group was April 18, 2015 and was about replacing a Hopper drive.

Note that my advice is based on the assumption that the ExpressVu 5100 is a twin to the DISH 510 and from pictures on the Internet, that looks to be correct. If your DVR isn't an MPEG2 SD model that had 100 hours of recording capacity, I've possibly been leading you down the wrong path.

 

[Ed Goldstein]

I'm beginning to think it might just be easier to get a replacement PVR. Can anyone recommend a model? Like I said, I can only receive the Nimiq satellite at 91 so I don't need a lot. The irony is I don't really care about the PVR. I just want to be able to receive the same channels as my other receivers and the bad hard drive seems to be the reason why I can't update my channel selection since synchronizing doesn't seem to do anything.

 

[harshness]

Consider the HD receiver (much like the DISH 211). You can plug in a small USB hard drive and turn it into a DVR.

 

[Davage]

It's been ages since I've tried it, but I believe that one time that I had a PVR hard drive fail, I was able to open up the receiver and simply unplug the cables from the hard drive, and it then functioned like a regular receiver. That's going back many years..