Sky+ problem during playback - any ideas?

My Sky+ box is driving me mad - does anyone know what's wrong with it? It's the Pace DV3 model. It's 14 months old.

When playing back recorded programs, I get glitches where playback will get stuck. It seems to be getting worse and can get freeze up for up to 10 seconds before suddenly starting at the point it should be at if the freezing hadn't occured (often making what is best described as a electronic squelching noise!)

Also, when fast forwarding or rewinding a recording, the picture is staggered and freezes and jumps rather than showing a continuous speeded up picture as it used to.

All this only happens on some recordings, not all.

I'm wondering whether the drive needs formatting... Is there a function to do this?

Thanks for any tips or ideas.

 

Sounds to me like the internal hard disc is on it's way out... there are some excellent guides on replacing it here if you do a quick search!

 

I had similar problems with my Pace V2 when it was about 15mths old - recordings kept freezing and then starting again from the beginning.

I reformatted the drive (the housekeeping proceedure). It cured it temporarily but only for a few days.

I took the 40GB maxtor out of the sky+ and hooked it up to my pc. I downloaded some Maxtor diagnostic tools and they confirmed the hard disc was beginning to fail.

I had a Samsung spinpoint 120GB I wasn't using so I put that in the SKY+ box and its been working perfectly since for 4 months now - and with 3x the capacity.

As already pointed out plenty of guidance available on here or over at digitalspy.

 

Excellent, thanks chaps.