Excessive Pilexation after New Hard Drive installed

[OaklandJB]

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Hi,
I have a Series 2 Directv Philips DSR7000/17 box.

I 'baked' a Seagate Barracuda 250 GB ST3250623A-RK hard drive last month and it soon started pixelating lots of shows. Then would record fine and then go intermittently bad again. Every replay showed the same errors in the same places. So, it appears that it is recorded badly.

I have a second Series 1 box and recorded the same shows at the exact same time (using low quality setting) and they weren't pixelating.

My dish is unobstructed and the weather outside seemed fine. (Don't know about solar flares etc) When it is pouring down rain, I understand why I get the same kind of pixelation.

When the Series 2 crashed/restarted while pixelating, I immediately returned the Seagate within the 30 day period and got a Western Digital Caviar SE WD2500JBRTL 250 GB HD to replace it.

Well, after 10 days the WD Caviar is now starting to pixelate the shows again. Only much worse this time. I tested it against identical shows on my Series 1 box and the Series 1 box has no pixelation. Then, after several hours of bad, the Series 2 starts recording well. And then later ... bad again.

I have not modified any software from my original downloaded instantcake software. (11/11/06 6:28pm PST instantcake-dsr7000-6.2-01-2-101.iso) Nor any hardware changes. I'm not too computer literate.

Is there any software problem that might cause these problems? Like read/write rates or buffers??? I know that one had 16mb buffer and one had 8mb buffer.

Or do you think it is a hardware disk problem? And I just got unlucky with two in a row.

Is there any difference in the ULTRA ATA/100 vs the ATA/133????I have stayed away from the Serial ATA Drives. I only get the PATA or EIDE drives

Also, I have dual LNB's on my directv dish. And an 8-way signal splitter that DirecTV installed.

If one of the LNB's was going out and corrupting the signal, I'd think the second dvr would record the same static too. But I don't know they split work between the two LNB's.

I also looked at the signal splitter box connections and the connections to the back of the Series 2 box and all cables look tight. The bad pixelation only happens for an hour or two of recording at a time. Then records fine for several shows that it records.

Should I just go exchange this WD hard drive too? I only have 3 days to return it to Circuit City.

Thanks for any guidance.
JMB

[A J Ricaud]

It sure sounds like a drive going bad.

[jangelj]

Oakland, I am experiencing a similiar problem. I was getting pixellation on my HDVR2 Directivo for several days, but not on my SA series 1. I got up one morning and the hard drvie was clicking and the screen was completely black. An obvious hard drive failure, right?

So I head to compusa, buy a WD 250 GB HD and use the mfstools boot cd to backup and restore from the old drive (it had enough life left to boot up at least one more time so I could retrieve the software and my shows.

I put the imaged 250 GB WD in the tivo and it powers up just fine. My now playing list is intact, but I am still getting intermittent pixellation. It appears to be random. No bad weather or anything. And my SA series 1 looks fine while viewing the same show on the same channel.

Have you found the reason why you have been having this problem? My next step is to check the temperature and signal strength. Maybe my directivo is just "pickier" about the signal strength.
John

[OaklandJB]

Hi Guys,
I have definitely isolated the pixelation problem to where it seems to be that the DIRECTV Philips DSR7000 is bad at the SAT INPUT 2 jack.

Through lots of isolation testing, I verified I have a good satellite signal. In the final testing, when I plug the cable into SAT INPUT 1, the picture is fine. Plug the same cable into SAT INPUT 2 and the picture pixelates.

Is there a tuner part inside of the DVR box that I can replace?

Also, I checked the operating temperature and it say 41 degrees C.

Thanks for any help.
JMB

[OaklandJB]

Hi
I just saw a thread in DirecTV with TIVO forum that indicates that the failing INPUT 2 tuner problem is happening quite a bit. (search using my name OAKLANDJB)

Someone suggested discontinuing use of S-VIDEO and another suggested using the 'restart' option from the menus, not just unplugging.

Restarting seems to have fixed my pixelation problem for the moment

Hope it continues to be fixed.
JMB