My third Hopper died on me....kind of

[benylevy]

I know...long story, but I'm trying to get it all out in a hurry since the guy is coming over later today.

I had a Hopper and it started malfunctioning regularly so it was replaced. And then after about a year...same thing.

This time, however, this third Hopper lasted only about 3 months. There's a tech coming over today, but given the serious not-clued-in-ness of the "Advanced" team that answered the 800 line today, I don't know what he's going to be able to do other than just swap it out again.

The hitch this time, however...is instead of malfunctioning it just plain stopped working overnight and all day long. I could get it to the "starting up" screen, but it would never go past it. I listened for the hard drive spin up and wasn't hearing anything so on a hunch that I plugged out and plugged in my external drive. It worked a little longer, but then pooped out again. Twice within about an hour.

So...on a NEW hunch, I remembered the day before that I was having some problems with a timer. I had MLB Tonight recording every day at about the same time, but the timer stopped working right so I reset it up. This time, it recorded *EVERY* instance of it. Not what I'm looking for, so I deleted it and tried it again. For some reason it couldn't figure out that I wanted it every day at the same time, so it would either skip every recording even though it was set to daily because event already exists on DVR (?!?!?), or record always.

I deleted the timer, and also the "Manual Timer" that I hadn't previously seen that Dish put on there to record a promo event the next day.

Since then, no problems.

I don't want to keep swapping out refurb failures for refurb failures, I don't want to trade in a box with months worth of recordings on it, and I don't want to make a guy come out for no reason, especially if he isn't going to actually be able to fix anything.

I'm on my 20th year with Dish...I clearly am loyal, but I've already been through both the losing the programs on the internal drive tragedy AND the External Drive crashing scenario also.

Scott, DIRT team...ANYBODY. Does anyone have any idea what might actually be going on here? What could freak out the Hopper and make it unwilling to start up? What could make it work again? ANYTHING?

Thanks,

B

 

[andreab@DISH Network]

I ran into this issue with a Blu-Ray player recently. Turns out the outlet I kept plugging the player into was bad so it kept killing my player. You could be running into the same thing. Try a different outlet but the tech will be able to see what continues to cause this issue.

 

[benylevy]

I ran into this issue with a Blu-Ray player recently. Turns out the outlet I kept plugging the player into was bad so it kept killing my player. You could be running into the same thing. Try a different outlet but the tech will be able to see what continues to cause this issue.

I have it plugged into a UPS that looks like it's providing power just fine to all the devices. The Hopper went from not working AT ALL to working now after I played around with it.

Most of the tech's I've had over the years know their installation pretty well, but I've yet to have one come out that can diagnose anything hardware or software related. Usually they're like a company IT guy and go for the solution of least resistance "I don't know...switch the box out." I don't mean to be disparaging...unless there's something obvious or reported, how would they know?

Do any of the actual software or hardware engineers review the threads and the problems found within?

B

(p.s. By the way...the guy they sent today is pretty good! He'd still have no way of knowing, but he was honest and knowledgeable. Checking everything, ruling stuff out, fixing connections and the first one to point out we have one more dish than we need up there.)

 

[ChadT41]

This could be caused by quite a few things. If it go to starting up and no further, unplug the coax and reboot the receiver. See if it gets to the complete signal loss. If so, you likely have a grounding issue. That is usually the most prevalent right there. Also try bypassing the power strip and see if you get different results.