Scan Your Hard Drive

[drgranata]

Was recently having some problems with an HR-21-700 and called Tech Support. The guy wanted me to do a total reset to scan the disk for problems and I told him I didn't want to lose all my recorded programs. He got off the line for about 30 seconds and came back and told me to:

1. Do a red button reset
2. When the second blue screen came up "Almost there"
3. Hold down the record button and the down arrow on the receiver
4. Until the screen said "Scanning Disk" (about 20-30 seconds)

It scanned the disk without losing any recording or settings.

This trick is probably buried somewhere in this forum, but I hadn't heard of it before.

 

[Jimbo]

Was recently having some problems with an HR-21-700 and called Tech Support. The guy wanted me to do a total reset to scan the disk for problems and I told him I didn't want to lose all my recorded programs. He got off the line for about 30 seconds and came back and told me to:

1. Do a red button reset
2. When the second blue screen came up "Almost there"
3. Hold down the record button and the down arrow on the receiver
4. Until the screen said "Scanning Disk" (about 20-30 seconds)

It scanned the disk without losing any recording or settings.

This trick is probably buried somewhere in this forum, but I hadn't heard of it before.

Yup, you did a reformat....
Curious, how long did it take ?
I did mine once and it took about 8 hours, then I realized that I was reformatting the EHD I had plugged in.

And No, I did not lose any of my playlist either.

 

[wildbill129]

There are several different diagnostic tools hidden on HR series. What he did is a hard drive scan. It scans the hard drive for bad sectors and marks them so they are ignored. It is very similar to the disk scan in Windows.

A reformat will delete the master file table so the drive appears blank and reinstall the firmware. You will lose everything and it will be back to factory specs.

Jimbo, your drive must have been nearly fubar to take eight hours. Is it still working ok?

 

[Jimbo]

There are several different diagnostic tools hidden on HR series. What he did is a hard drive scan. It scans the hard drive for bad sectors and marks them so they are ignored. It is very similar to the disk scan in Windows.

A reformat will delete the master file table so the drive appears blank and reinstall the firmware. You will lose everything and it will be back to factory specs.

Jimbo, your drive must have been nearly fubar to take eight hours. Is it still working ok?

Thanks for the conformation, thats what I must have done too, too bad they won't tell you these things, that it wouldn't erase everything.........

My set up was not bad actually, it dawned on me half way thru that I was redoing the EHD and that was 750G's

 

[drgranata]

Mine took about 30 minutes. I don't think it was a reformat because I didn't lose anything.

 

[cfb]

When booting, press the select key on either the front panel or remote. You'll get a message "entering diagnostics mode".

You can then run tests on the system components and the hard drive. There is a file system checker which is non destructive (unless it encounters something bad in which case the unreadable or bad stuff may be deleted) and can solve a lot of problems if the file system is corrupted from too many power outages or RBR's. There is a smart short test which only takes a few minutes and will do a decent little drive checkup. There is a smart long test which can take several hours if you have a large drive but does a nice full test, and a 'surface test'. I dont know if the surface test is destructive or not, but it does a full sector test of the drive and from what I hear takes a very long time.