Sunday 2 December 2012

ONN T816 PVR fails to start

Recently, the local mains electrical sub-station failed.  After the power cut and numerous brown-outs my ONN DTR160 PVR (Personal Video Recorder), based upon the Vestel T816, failed to start up.  The display just kept saying, 'Starting...'.

I removed the mains power and removed the cover.  I disconnected the 160Gb EIDE (Western Digital) Hard Drive from its power and IDE connectors.  I switch on the PVR and then shortly got TV channels and 'HDD failure' on the display.  If it had not started then in all likelyhood it would have been the Power Supply.

Finding that the HDD was the failure, I took it out and decided to hook it up to my Linux Kubuntu PC.  If you don't have Linux yourself,  there are Live Linux CD/DVD that you can download and burn to disk.  Booting from these, you have access to a range of tools that I have discussed before on this Blog.

I started GParted (Partition Editor) and selected the last device that was 160GB sized.  This showed two partitions, a small boot and a larger storage partition.  Both of ext2 filetype but the main partition had a Exclamation icon next to it, signifying that the partition was corrupt.  I could at this point have tried to repair the partition with other tools but, as I did not have any programs I wanted to keep, I decided to format the partition.  DO NOT format the smaller boot partition!

Replacing the HDD back into the PVR it started!  I went through the Installation Setup which, formatted the HDD again and I was left with a working PVR again.  :-)


Currently known variations include: Alba ALDTR160 (Argos) • Digihome DTR80 and DTR160 (Argos) • Hitachi HDR082, HDR162, HDR163 & HDR253 (Argos) • Logik LPVR168 (Currys/Dixons) • ONN DTR80 and DTR160 (Asda) • Sharp TU-R162H & TU-R252H • Wharfedale DTR160 HDMI and DTR250 HDMI (Argos) • Wharfedale LP160DTRHDMI and LP250DTRHDMI (Argos)


No comments: