Sky+ and Power Cut

[Harrison]

I've so far tried A and B with no luck. I'm going to now try a remote recording to see if that tricks it into starting up. Failing that It will have to be D and lose all of my current recordings. Bit annoying as I have some films on there I wanted to watch, plus last nights Battlestar Galactica episode Although that is repeated tonight so I can still catch it if I can get the box working again so I can set it to be recorded!

[Zetr0]

@H

From what i have read, would it not be better to try method E and then D ?

[Harrison]

It would but my Sky box is stuck in standby mode so I can't switch it on to access the service menu. Therefore the only options I have are the ones that you can force the box to do by holding down combinations of buttons on the front of the box as you power it on from the mains.

Very annoying.

I must say though that until now this Sky+ box has been pretty reliable. Until now it has only locked up once and required a power down to reset it and everything has reported perfectly on there. But as with any harddrive based technology, if the HD is currently being accessed with you get a power cut there is always the danger of corrupted data or a damaged disk.

[Harrison]

Sadly after attempting all the other things I had to go with D and force a reset of the box. I've lost all of my recordings but the box is working again, which is the main thing.

[Bloodwych]

Sky+ boxes can be funny at times - they are by no means bug free, even though your issue was a powercut (still shouldn't cause a deadlock if it had been designed better).

I've had to rebuild the planner twice in the past, when we lost half of the drives capacity or a program wouldn't play correctly. Then it started to have issues on Movie premiers, skipping and stuttering both on normal watching and recording, but not other movie channels???? Very strange. Throw in the occasional lockup and failed recording and you have Sky+. Still the best paid service however compared to others.

Anyway, you didn't miss Battlestar - it wasn't on as Sci-Fi asked Sky to miss one week as we'd managed to creep ahead of the Americans! Last week we had the world premier of a Battlestar episode, which caused a few angry faces across the pond.

[Harrison]

Really? That is great news. I wondered why the usual repeat of Tuesday night's episode wasn't on tonight. That has pleased me greatly as this episode is the one where we find out what has happened to the renegade Cylon base ship and all of the BSG pilots that were on it. I've been really looking forward to that since the last episode.

This final series is turning out to be great. I can't see how they are going to conclude it all with just a few episodes to go. I hope they don't rush the ending or leave it completely up in the air.

[Harrison]

Regarding my Sky+ box. I think it might have been recording something when the power cut happened. Therefore it was writing to the HD when it lost power and we all know what can happen then. Not really something the developers of the box could do much about, although some short term UPS system that quickly stops the recording and powers down the HD before losing it's charge might have fixed that.

I actually had more problems with the standard Sky boxes I had before the Sky+ box. My first box lasted a couple of years before finally not working and just displayed a no satellite signal error message all of the time. But before that it would often lock up or lose its signal and require a power off to reset it.

After that one went wrong it was replaced with a horrible Grundig box which started to smoke and overheat to the point of nearly catching fire just 10 minutes after the Sky engineer had installed it and driven off! I'm sure that one was a dodgy box the engineer had in his van from a previous call out and he tried to palm me off with it. But a week later I finally got another box which was new as the engineer unwrapped it. And I do still have that one in the other room as I've got multiroom. Although it is a bit temperamental. It sometimes breaks up and pixelates on certain channels, and on some of the lifestyle channels it loses the sound and you have to move to another channel and back again to get the sound back.