Our DVR crashed - any way to recover shows

[GRhino]

We have a Dish VIP 722 DVR and it crashed. We have over 100 hours of shows on there that we never got a chance to watch. Is there any way to recover those so we could watch them?

When the Dish guy left, he mentioned that I might be able to download them to something (flash drive ?), but he was very vague about it. He was actually kind of pissed because I refused to let him take the crashed DVR with him...as were his orders. FWIW, this was the 4th time in 2 1/2 years we've had to have one of these same DVR's replaced. Dish sucks!!!

And our hands are tied because we can't get DirecTV is our rinky dink town because they don't offer local channels. We'd have to get an antenna to get local channels, & even then, we couldn't record them on the DVR with DirecTV. At least that's what I've been told.

 

[wherzwaldo]

Without having researched these particular DVRs, it may be possible to remove the hard drive, connect it to your computer, and see if you see anything. It might be a different (read: incompatible) file system, though. For instance, I know TiVo's run on Linux, and in order for Windows to read Linux file systems you have to install special software.

A flash drive would likely not be big enough for all your shows. That hard drive is probably at least 100GB if not much larger.

 

[14tokihorn]

lmgtfy

lmgtfy2

After a quick scan, it appears Dish will sell you a 2nd external drive to transfer you recordings to. But you can't, say, take out the drive and hook it to a `puter.... won't work. All this assumes the drive itself is not fried.

Uverse will not allow you to remove the drive and hook it to a `puter either, to access the recordings. I'll leave out the tech details, but I was curious to your situation w/ Dish.

 

[YoLaDu]

In reply to:

---

---

 

[GRhino]

In reply to:

---

---

 

[Longhorny630]

I can speak for DirecTV DVR's because that's what I use. I know we had some standard def dvr's that we no longer needed and were collecting dust in the basement, so I took them apart and am currently using the hard drives in my computer. When I put them in my computer (IDE), there was some data on them, but it was in a format that I had never seen. It's def not going to be a simple avi or mpeg or anything like that, or even a disk image of a dvd or anything.

The only thing I could think of is taking the hard drive out and put it into another DVR. I would bet that you could watch the recorded stuff that way. Or fomat the drive and use it as a new storage device in your computer.

 

[TexasEd]

Clarification question:

Is the DVR processing hardware dead or did the hard drive crash?

If the hard drive crashed you are going to have a harder time recovering.

 

[GRhino]

I'm not 100% sure, but I think the DVR hard drive crashed. Our satellite reception just went blank and we couldn't even access the recorded programs. If you stood up close enough to the DVR, you could hear it making this spinning noise. It was probably the 5th-6th time this same DVR had done this. On previous occasions we were able to get it going again by just shutting the power off & on several times. Not this time. I kept it for 2 weeks & the spinning noise never stopped. I finally gave up & just returned it to a local Dish office.

And I never tried opening the box because I don't know enough about it to put it back together, & I didn't want to get hit with a $200-300 charge.

Thanks for the help anyway.