Once upon a time Ron Koms shaped the electrons to say...
> What it does is video gets a little scrambled for about 2 seconds, while at
> the same time the audio is lost for about 8 or 10 seconds. So I rewind, and
> find that segment is ok. It does think about every 30 seconds to a minute.
> Sometimes maybe 4 or 5 minutes will go by before it does it again...
If the same segment plays fine when you rewind it is probably not the
hard drive. It could be, but usually if the drive were causing
playback problems it would be a bad sector which would be bad every
time you played that bit.
It could still be the drive maybe causing problems as the unit writes
log files, etc, but it may just be that the unit momentarily had a
load spike - does this tend to happen when the unit is recording other
content and/or downloading content/
> Starting to happen more frequent with longer blackouts and even a quick
> short chirp once in a while...
Hmm, see, this is one reason I think it could be the drive.
Progressive drive failures act like this. First once in a while, then
more often, until finally it happens regularly and the then drive
dies completely.
> Does this sound like a hard drive going?
It does and it doesn't. But it definitely could be, and if the
frequency of the issue keeps increasing then I'd really suspect the drive.
> 2 or 3 years old, I'll have to look it up.
IIRC the S3 first shipped in September 2006, so it couldn't be even
two years old at this point.
> Warranty??
90 days. So, nope.
If it is the drive you could get a replacement from DVRupgrade:
http://www.dvrupgrade.com/dvr/stores/1/category.cfm?Category_ID=2&Product_ID=0&ModelID=115&type=Model&page=cat&CFID=978475&CFTOKEN=60792019&AFID=24
I literally just (like 15 minutes ago) installed a replacement drive
from DVRupgrade in my Pioneer DVR-810H.
Or, if you're comfortable with hardware and prepared to image your own
drive, pick up your own SATA drive and use Instant Cake:
http://www.dvrupgrade.com/dvr/stores/1/instantcake.cfm?AFID=24
Instant Cake will image a new drive with a fresh install, like a
factory disc.
Or the Universal Boot CD, which would allow you to copy the image from
your existing drive, and even copy existing settings and recordings:
http://www.dvrupgrade.com/dvr/stores/1/uberCD.cfm?AFID=24 The risk of
using this CD is that if there is corruption on your existing disc,
you might copy the corrupted data over too. If it is just in a
recording it'd be fine, you can just delete the recording. But if
there is any corrupting in the OS sectors, you could have trouble.
-MZ
--
megazone-at-megazone.org http://www.MegaZone.org/ Gweep, Geek, Human, me.
http://www.GizmoLovers.com/ http://www.Eyrie-Productions.com/ -><- Hail Eris
"A little nonsense now and then, is relished by the wisest men" 508-852-2171
