Hard drive failures in an HR20-700 HD-DVR - solved.

[PlainBill]

About 6 months ago I noticed a 'stuttering' during playback of recording on my HR20-700 DirecTV DVR. Since I had upgraded the internal drive to a 1 Terrabyte drive 3 years ago, I had assumed the replacement drive was developing problems. The replacement drive was full, so I elected to upgrade to a 2 Terrabyte drive. Initially, that worked well, but after a few months the problem resurfaced. At this time I took a closer look at the power supply area and realized that the drives weren't dying, they were being killed!! Note the three caps on the right in the picture.

A closer examination showed the caps were United Chemi-Con KZG series. Since UCC's KZG series has been 'problematic', I ordered Nichicon HM series from Digi-Key. After replacing all 5 KZG caps I found the two in the signal processing area were fine, reading 0.01 on an ESR meter (spec is 0.013). However the three in the power supply area were 'slightly' out of spec. One read over 100 ohms, the other two were in the 80 - 90 ohm area.

At this point the DVR has been working well for over a month.

PlainBill

[PCBONEZ]

Re: Hard drive failures in an HR20-700 HD-DVR - solved.

And thus the oft asked question 'can bad caps damage a hard drive' is definitively answered.
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Thanks for the report.
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[japlytic]

Re: Hard drive failures in an HR20-700 HD-DVR - solved.

Talking about the often asked question, damage can happen if a unmonitored rail goes dangerously high.
This happened in a PVR I have handled too.

[kc8adu]

Re: Hard drive failures in an HR20-700 HD-DVR - solved.

your old drives may be ok.had a noname chinese dvr here with 5 hdd's marked bad.
the real problem was caps but it was locking up with "hdd possible fail replace"on the screen.engrish preserved.
the owner thought the footage of someone trying to turn the place into a drive through was gone due to a bad drive.much to the dismay of the punks in their dads pickup i got the drives going in it and exported the attempt including good face shots and the plate!
imagine the look on their faces when the cops show up 6 months later to serve a warrent!

[PlainBill]

Re: Hard drive failures in an HR20-700 HD-DVR - solved.

your old drives may be ok.had a noname chinese dvr here with 5 hdd's marked bad.
the real problem was caps but it was locking up with "hdd possible fail replace"on the screen.engrish preserved.
the owner thought the footage of someone trying to turn the place into a drive through was gone due to a bad drive.much to the dismay of the punks in their dads pickup i got the drives going in it and exported the attempt including good face shots and the plate!
imagine the look on their faces when the cops show up 6 months later to serve a warrent!

Not a chance on the 2 Tbyte drive. Even the WD diagnostics couldn't reallocate the bad sectors.

PlainBill

[Toasty]

Re: Hard drive failures in an HR20-700 HD-DVR - solved.

HDD Regenerator

Has fixed many a "bad" drive.

A 2T would likely take 7-10 days 24/7 depending on how much is truly "bad".

[PCBONEZ]

Re: Hard drive failures in an HR20-700 HD-DVR - solved.

HDD Regenerator

Has fixed many a "bad" drive.

A 2T would likely take 7-10 days 24/7 depending on how much is truly "bad".

Same experience with Active Killdisk.
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When a drive has other problems sectors that aren't bad can get marked bad.
The drive won't recheck them later even with most HDD diagnostics.
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Those two mentioned products ignore and overwrite 'the bad list' along with the whole drive [every bit] including the MBR and partition tables.
That forces the drive to create a new list of bad sectors from scratch.
Sectors that were erroneously reported bad earlier are restored to use.
[That isn't the program's goal, it's a side effect.]
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Obviously it won't fix all drives but I've had something like a 75% success rate.
I also have not had issues with drives 'fixed' that way 'breaking' again later.
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Killdisk more or less does a 'once-through' by writting every bit once, which is enough to cause the firmware to recheck previously marked sectors.
[If I remember correctly a 1TB drive takes like 12-16 hours.]
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If your goal is to try to fix -actually- bad sectors then HDD Regenerator is the way to go.
It works by being extra persistent with those that don't want to play [read/write] immediately and by witting each bit more than once.
That's why it takes so much longer to run.
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Western Digital's 'wipe' function -might- achieve the same thing but I don't trust it to -actually- wipe/overwrite every bit like Killdisk does.
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- Convenient example:
I'm on the ancient 'kitchen system' right now.
2 or 3 years ago the RAID card decided one of the drives was bad.
Pulled it, ran kill disk on it, put it right back in the array.
The array rebuilt it and not a problem since.
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[lti]

Re: Hard drive failures in an HR20-700 HD-DVR - solved.

I guess I was lucky to just have a really high Ultra ATA CRC error rate on a hard drive that was in an unstable computer. That drive has no bad sectors.

My parents' DirecTV DVR has always been unstable and is almost full, but I am not going to take it apart. It needs to be reset once a month because the sound or video will start stuttering (even during live TV playback) or it will stop responding to the remote (pressing any button causes the "invalid entry" sound to be played).

[Toasty]

Re: Hard drive failures in an HR20-700 HD-DVR - solved.

Isn't Active KillDisk just for wiping though? I just read their site and I don't see anything about preserving the data...?

HDD Regenerator does -not- overwrite or destroy data. It will, as pointed out, try to read a sector for an extended time and rewrite the info back to the sector. It runs on the drive before any OS loads and does not care how the drive is formatted, same as AKD. As with AKD, it's low-level.

Available at your local "heavy-downpour" site in both diskette and CD ISO images...

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[PCBONEZ]

Re: Hard drive failures in an HR20-700 HD-DVR - solved.

Isn't Active KillDisk just for wiping though? I just read their site and I don't see anything about preserving the data...?

Yes it wipes it. Writes all zeros.
Has other functions I've never looked at.

HDD Regenerator does -not- overwrite or destroy data.

I thought it alternately wrote ones and zeros until the sector was responsive.
An 'exerciser' so to speak.

For data recovery I've used Ontrack Easy Recovery Pro - because it doesn't attempt to write TO a bad disk.
Once I have what I need off of it I wipe the drive with killdisk and then test it.
Haven't had a need to do data recovery in a very long time because anything that important is on RAID now.
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[Toasty]

Re: Hard drive failures in an HR20-700 HD-DVR - solved.

Here's the info on the 2011 version (which I just d/l'd):

http://www.dposoft.net/hdd.html

Now makes a bootable Flash drive too. Nice

It also claims to have what appear to be some nice improvements. One's I see that look to be promising are the prescan mode, faster scanning speed, and process resume except from CD/DVD. (Must need to write where it left off.)

Toast