Got L116 Last Night - Lost All Programs on HDD Today

[hojni]

I'm pretty ticked right now. L116 loaded last night and all seemed fine. However, this morning the record light was on when nothing should have been recording. Turned on the TV and saw a message about a hard disk failure - everything reinstalled and all programs lost. I hate dish right now, but signed up for warranty service in case this thing craps out again.

Let's just hope for everyone else's sake that this was truely a HW problem and not L116. My 721 has been running flawless since I bought it over 1 year ago (except for the obvious bugs that everyone else has experienced).

 

[Randy_B]

Same thing happened here. Woke up to find the unit "clicking" with no green light on. Eventually it reimaged the HD and wiped EVERYTHING. All E* could say was "sorry" and ship a replacement unit. Lost 60 hrs of recordings (season to date for Alias, NYPD Blue and Friends). I guess fortunately we finishe dup the 24 episodes last night.

 

[bsobel]

Same thing happened here. Woke up to find the unit "clicking" with no green light on. Eventually it reimaged the HD and wiped EVERYTHING. All E* could say was "sorry" and ship a replacement unit. Lost 60 hrs of recordings (season to date for Alias, NYPD Blue and Friends). I guess fortunately we finishe dup the 24 episodes last night.

Same here. We thought it was a 721 glitch, Dish support (of course) said they never heard if it before. I guess it was tied to 116. We lost about 80 hours of stuff (wife is rather unpleased )

Bill

 

[aperry]

Same thing happened here. Woke up to find the unit "clicking" with no green light on. Eventually it reimaged the HD and wiped EVERYTHING. All E* could say was "sorry" and ship a replacement unit. Lost 60 hrs of recordings (season to date for Alias, NYPD Blue and Friends). I guess fortunately we finishe dup the 24 episodes last night.

Maybe you need to keep up better with your programs? Sorry, couldn't resist...

Seriously though, that is a major bummer. I lost about a week's worth of stuff a while back (we record A LOT of stuff every week), and was cursing Dish for a while about that one...

 

[ken]

DISH software geeks just plain suck. Not to long ago I lost 70 hours of programming and if it happens again I plan to talk to a (gag) lawyer. DISh will not replace my (second) 721 covered by a service plan since they claim all of the problems are known software issues.

 

[DmitriA]

DISh will not replace my (second) 721 covered by a service plan since they claim all of the problems are known software issues.

Which is correct. I'm sure there is absolutely nothing wrong with your box. Replacing it would not do you any good. It's the software that's the problem.

 

[retiredTech]

THE PROBLEM IS NOT EXCLUSIVELY SOFTWARE.

IF IT WERE JUST SOFTWARE ONLY ALL 721s would lose the programs.

MANY 721 are working fine even with the updates. Mine is.

SO it has be either a combo of your hardware and software

OR some specific issue that the ones who are having crashes.
(ie a recording during sw update or loss of signal, ect or whatever)

If it was strictly software all units would have the exact same problem,

so don't don't rule out a hardware issue or combination of issues.

 

[DmitriA]

You must have never done any software development if it seems strange to you that code running on identical platforms can work just fine on one box under one set of conditions and completely fail on another. It's caused by error conditions in normally hard to reach places that can only be triggered under a certain specific set of events.
I'm absolutely certain that 99% of the people who are having problems with the box have perfectly fine hardware. Modern hardware (hard drives, memory, processor, etc) just doesn't fail that often these days and certainly not in such huge numbers. I have boxes at home and at work that are being put through much more stress than any Dish receiver ever was 24/7 and they've been running fine for years now. In fact, I'm sure that whenever Dish receives those RMAed boxes, they simply reload the software and ship it out to the next unsuspecting customer without replacing any components in the box itself. The "solution" of sending you a replacement box is simply a way for tech support to show that they are doing something to help your problem.

 

[ken]

My point is- They break it, They fix it. Not only have they NOT done that, they are making it worse. They took a year to beta test this crap and they still can not get it right, in fact the more they touch it the worse it gets. In my industry (security) if I were to screw up on programming the equipment I would be held libel. They need to be held accountable for the stupidity we are now seeing. What is the use of a 90 hour hard drive if you loose all the programming.