Friday, August 03, 2007

DVR Freak Out Moment

So last Saturday night I went to check the living room DVR and make certain it still had room to record, it's a DVR included in our cable box. I turned it on and received "A Fatal Disc Write Error" message that caused my hair to stand.

Shocked and scared, I immediately turned it off, waited a few minutes and then tried again. I received the same message and pressing a variety of buttons didn't change a thing. I turned it off before Boo saw it and went to bed.

Sunday morning I checked the cable/DVR box and was greeted by the same message. Fear entrenched itself in the pit of my stomach because I knew the DVR had to be at least 80% full. It contained all of the summer season episodes of Psych, Monk, Eureka and Doctor Who that's a lot of shows to miss.

Now I rarely phone the cable company as Boo handles it, but since I knew Boo would freak worse than me, I decided I'd better handle it. Well several "Can you please hold?", "The screen is still blank?" and audible sighs of concern/stress from the Charter tech minutes later the issue was successfully resolved and all of our recorded shows reappeared.  

This experience opened my eyes though, because what if Charter couldn't solve the problem? The sole solution is trade out the cable/DVR box and with it ALL saved recordings. My cable company doesn't back up any of the recorded programs saved on the DVR. Since I don't own the box, I can't alter it by adding a second drive. We would be totally screwed!

So try not to fill your Cable DVR box to the gills. You never know when it will die on you and with it all of your favorite can't miss shows.

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