[sebbelcher]

Hi folks,

My DV717 has developed a strange fault, I went to bed after watching a DVD one night and when I woke up in the morning I realised we had had a power cut during the night because all the clocks on electrical devices had reset themselves. This is fairly normal for where I live (in the middle of nowhere) as trees are constantly falling on power lines, so for this reason all my AV equipment is connected through a surge protector.

However this time it seems to have properly screwed up the DVD player. When I awoke that morning the DVD player, as expected, was back on but in standby mode, the problem is that it is now stuck in standby mode, no amount of button pressing, both on the remote and on the unit itself can bring the player out of standby.

The player just sits there with the red standby light on, when you press a button on either the remote or the unit the standby light flashes, as if it is recognising the command but then fails to actually do anything.

I have removed the cover, re-seated all the boards and checked all the internal connections, i've also tried moving the laser carriage around manually opening the drawer incase it's stuck in some software loop but nothing seems to be able to revive it.

Does anyone know what might be the problem? It certainly seems to be a software issue, is there a way of hard-resetting the unit back to factory settings that might fix the problem?

Thanks in advance for any advice.

Cheers,
Seb.

[Damian1978]

Holding down the Stop button on the unit then switching it on via the main power button will reset the unit.

No idea if it will work but good luck.

[General Skanky]

Does it have the old 'added chip' multi region hack? ie, look in the small side slot by the vent on the right of the chasis as you look at it.

If so, pull out the multi region chip then reinsert after a power up/off cycle.

Seen that before and it should do the trick.

[sebbelcher]

Yes it is multi-region, I remember now, it had the multi-region chip installed, the seller specifically said it wouldn't invalidate the warranty because it just slotted in through a vent on the side.

Thing is, there is nothing in that expansion slot now, is it possible for it to have fallen out? How securely is it held in? Perhaps the power cut was just coincidence, infact I never switch the player off, so it'd quite possible the chip fell out a while back and the power cut was the first time the machine got power-cycled since...

How big is the chip? I can't see it inside the machine anywhere, I fear it may have fallen on the floor when I picked the unit up, probably long since gone up the hoover.

Perhaps getting hold of a new chip might fix the player? Does anyone know where I could find one?

[General Skanky]

From memory it's about the size of a sim card - ish.

It may be that it has been pushed all the way into the slot. In which case a pair of tweezers are needed to pull it out.

Remember, it's my best guess from repairing those players a long time ago, as that was the most common fault after duff power supplies, in which case you'd be looking at buying a new player anyway.

[General Skanky]

Any joy?