Upgrading Amstrad PVR3 Sky+ to 500gig hard drive
// September 29th, 2008 // No Comments » // Uncategorized
It didn’t take me long to decide to upgrade the HD in my sky+. The stock drive was quiet enough spinning and reading but did have an annoying high pitched squeak all the time. The stockdrive is a seagate, I think I probably just got a slightly noisy one.
I went for another Seagate Consumer electronics drive model ST3500830ACE.
Install was easy. Just swapped the drive. At first the box just booted up blank with the HD constantly running. I then did the following:
unplug the digibox from the mains power. Press and hold the ‘left’ and ‘right’ navigation buttons on the front of the digibox whilst you plug it back into the mains. Continue holding the buttons in for about 20 seconds, and when the ring of light on the front comes on, press the ‘select’ button on the front of the digibox (between the left and right buttons you were holding). The Sky+ recording logo lights will spin backwards and, according to the Sky engineer, this will “clear the hard drive”.
Once this is done, unplug the digibox from the mains power again and this time press and hold the ‘back up’ button whilst you plug it back into the mains power. Continue holding it for about 15 seconds until 3 lights on the front of the box come on and you get a full-screen message saying “Updating system software. Do not disconnect mains supply or satellite dish.”
Leave the digibox doing its thing for about 10 minutes and it should be fixed! Try pausing and recording things again… hopefully you’ve just saved yourself £65.
If you’ve not been so lucky, call Sky* again but remember that if they try to charge you for an engineer callout, just ask to cancel your subscription and they should offer you a free callout to fix the problem – you’re more valuable to them as a paying customer than the cost of an engineer callout.
Props to http://www.satellites.co.uk/satellite/sky-pvr-systems/62938-sky-cant-reformat.html
All works great, pretty quiet (slight reading sound but nothing bad) and much less of a squeak.
Tempted to put the drive in an enclosure to reduce the noise further but will probably leave it alone for a bit.
Feel free to comment if you have any questions..
Update 10.10.08
All working fine still, I have noticed a few blips in audio on some recordings and the sound takes longer to start when you start to play a video sometimes (only a few seconds, but noticably longer than with the other drive). I have also notices that the program discriptions (when you press ‘i’ button) sometimes get muddled on the planner which is odd but not to much of a problem.
