# Almost all programs deleted... due to a software update????



## hobiecatter (Jul 16, 2009)

I have two HR20-700's One in the bedroom and one in the living room. Both have MRV since day one without a hiccup. Both have recordings saved on them from over a year ago that I want to keep.

I get home from work yesterday and find that the bedroom unit suddenly has 83% available and almost everything on its playlist has been deleted. Only a few random shows that were recorded within the last week remain. I checked the living room unit, and there are a few programs that are gone, but most are still there. So... I freak out!

I rebooted both units, same thing. (of course) I started looking in the history to see if I can find a clue. Many of the programs that were once there say "this showing was canceled because of a problem retaining the program (45)". As well as a few of them say "This episode was canceled because of a programming update. (13)" 

I know that something has gone catastraphically wrong, and it is not by my doings. So I call DTV. When I first got on the phone with an agent and explained my situation, she gave me 3 months of Starz, uh great but I don't ever watch Starz. Anyway, after finally getting to Technical Support, I explained the issue and he didn't know of anything at first. After putting me on hold and asking around, he came back to say there was a "program update" sent out today that caused programs to be deleted. He said others have the same issue and they are giving out free Starz until they can get it figured out and hopefully can find a way to undelete the lost programs. He said to keep an eye on it and they might show back up in a couple days.

I am very skeptical that they will magically reappear. I've been using DVR's and Tivos with DirecTV ever since they came out and I've never seen or heard of this happening. It appears that I'm the only one that had this happend as well, because I can't find anyone else.

Any ideas what is going on here?


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## Doug Brott (Jul 12, 2006)

Without knowing all of the specifics, it's very hard to say exactly what is going on, but I can assure you that if this was a widespread issue, DBSTalk would be blowing up .. It's happened a couple of times over the last few years (locked up set top boxes).

This particular case sounds like a marginal HDD getting "corrected" after a restart. Sadly, if your programs are gone, they are gone .. Any chance you had an external HDD plugged in?


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## Stuart Sweet (Jun 19, 2006)

This is the first I've heard of an update doing this; it's more likely at this point that the CSR is confused. 

My guess, off the top of my head, is that the hard drive on your HR20 is going and that the recordings that were deleted were on corrupt parts of the drive. 

When the DVR reboots for any reason, including an update, it runs a self-check and attempts to repair drive errors. When unrecoverable errors are found, the programs are deleted.


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## Doug Brott (Jul 12, 2006)

Also, regarding a "program update," there have been a few firmware updates over the last several days, but nothing for the HR20-700. In other words, there was definitely NOT a "program update" for the HR20-700 in the last 20-30 days. So that cannot be what caused this to happen.


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## CCarncross (Jul 19, 2005)

My HR20-700 had no such issue(program update or otherwise). My guess is you have a failing HDD in one of your HR20's...if the programs are already gone, you arent going to be getting them back...THe 20-700's are the oldest of the HR2x series and hence are probably prone to higher rates of failures nowadays due to age....I have benn running external HDD on all 3 of DVR's for many years now just to try to avoid such issues. If I get any hint of a potential HDD problem, I just copy the drive contents to another drive and never lose recordings that way. Obviously this only works if the HDD goes bad, the rest of the DVR must continue to work as recordings are not transferable to a different unit than what they were recorded on.


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## hobiecatter (Jul 16, 2009)

Sadly, I agree and knew that my programs were gone forever. I also agree that this CSR did not know what he was talking about. I immediately checked dbstalk and concluded that this is an isolated incident.

I do not have an external HD on either one of them...yet. Looks like I'll be looking into that. Just haven't had an issue with running out of room so I never explored that route.

It does make sense that the hard drive is going out, and that was my first thought. Until I noticed that both DVR's are missing some content. The Living room unit is not missing as much, but there are still a few programs that were just there the day before and I was watching them, that are now gone. This was confirmed by looking at the history on that DVR. 

So both of them having programs "canceled" makes it harder for me to call it a failing HD. But maybe a fluke....


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## Doug Brott (Jul 12, 2006)

I've not heard of this error before "canceled because of a problem retaining the program," but it really sounds like a disk correction was done and the program in question simply had too many errors so it was removed.

Any chance there was a power event? That could have caused both units to restart. The disk checking is continuous though so it doesn't require a reset. press and hold {INFO} and then "Run System Test" .. This could let you know if there are HDD issues.


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## veryoldschool (Dec 10, 2006)

hobiecatter said:


> So both of them having programs "canceled" makes it harder for me to call it a failing HD. But maybe a fluke....


I think this message has nothing to do with your problem.
I haven't lost any recordings [at least right now :lol:] and yet when I look at my history, I see listings of canceled too. Sometimes this is related to the show not being a first run [most of my SLs are set this way] and sometimes it says it had a problem "retaining" them. I've also seen one program be listed twice at the same time. One gives an error while the other doesn't and recorded fine.


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## veryoldschool (Dec 10, 2006)

Doug Brott said:


> I've not heard of this error before "canceled because of a problem retaining the program," ...


You might need to look at your history more.  :lol:


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## hobiecatter (Jul 16, 2009)

Doug Brott said:


> Any chance there was a power event? press and hold {INFO} and then "Run System Test" .. This could let you know if there are HDD issues.


I do suspect that there was a power event because my wireless headphone transmitter was off and that happens when there is a power event. I'll run system test to see what shows up.


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## hobiecatter (Jul 16, 2009)

veryoldschool said:


> I think this message has nothing to do with your problem.
> I haven't lost any recordings [at least right now :lol:] and yet when I look at my history, I see listings of canceled too. Sometimes this is related to the show not being a first run [most of my SLs are set this way] and sometimes it says it had a problem "retaining" them. I've also seen one program be listed twice at the same time. One gives an error while the other doesn't and recorded fine.


If you are referring to the message "this showing was canceled because of a problem retaining the program (45)". This was the message that is in my history on all or most of the programs that were in my playlist for days even weeks that are now gone. With instances on BOTH of my DVR's. Some of which I was just watching parts of the day before (but didn't delete on my own) and now show in my history with this message.

Strange, I'll look into the system test and hard drive integrity a little more.


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## veryoldschool (Dec 10, 2006)

hobiecatter said:


> If you are referring to the message "this showing was canceled because of a problem retaining the program (45)". This was the message that is in my history on all or most of the programs that were in my playlist for days even weeks that are now gone. With instances on BOTH of my DVR's. Some of which I was just watching parts of the day before (but didn't delete on my own) and now show in my history with this message.
> 
> Strange, I'll look into the system test and hard drive integrity a little more.


Yes, I just looked at the history on my HR24 & HR20. Over the past two weeks or so, there are over six times that I have that message under "canceled". Most of the time there are two listing of the same show at the same time, but there are at least a couple that were only listed once.
To the best of my knowledge I haven't missed any recording of any shows.
I "watch & delete", so there aren't too many stored on either DVR right now.


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## hobiecatter (Jul 16, 2009)

Ok, thanks veryoldschool for taking the time to confirm this for me.


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## Eben (Sep 10, 2007)

hobiecatter said:


> I do suspect that there was a power event because my wireless headphone transmitter was off and that happens when there is a power event. I'll run system test to see what shows up.


If you don't have your DVR on a UPS, get one.


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## TomCat (Aug 31, 2002)

hobiecatter said:


> ... I started looking in the history to see if I can find a clue. Many of the programs that were once there say "this showing was canceled because of a problem retaining the program (45)". ... He said others have the same issue and they are giving out free Starz until they can get it figured out and hopefully can find a way to undelete the lost programs. He said to keep an eye on it and they might show back up in a couple days.
> 
> I am very skeptical that they will magically reappear. I've been using DVR's and Tivos with DirecTV ever since they came out and I've never seen or heard of this happening. It appears that I'm the only one that had this happend as well, because I can't find anyone else.
> 
> Any ideas what is going on here?


Not specifically regarding this incident, and it is very disturbing that more of us might have the same issue before the rollout is done (I hope they suspend it).

A "problem retaining the program" sounds like computer-speak for "I can't find the pointers to this program in the database anymore". Of course the programs are not gone, just the path to the pointers to them, but if they can't magically find the pointers again the end result is the same; recordings you can no longer access.

It might be worth it to suspend recording on the DVR as much as possible so that you do not overwrite programs that they very well may find eventually with a fix, but I would not bet the farm that they will.

I have heard this happening now 3 times on the forum with DTV DVRs over the years, including Tivo. Stuart is right in that the sanity check and DB reconcilliation at bootup deletes pointers for files that appear to not have perfect parameters, which is the equivalent of sending sand bags over the side sacrificing ballast when the balloon gets too low. But if you don't record over them, they might actually find a fix.

This is very reminiscent of being a DISH subscriber a decade ago; you could wake up to a wiped HDD at any minute. They regularly had this issue.



hobiecatter said:


> I do suspect that there was a power event because my wireless headphone transmitter was off and that happens when there is a power event. I'll run system test to see what shows up.


 A power event while writing to the drive (which happens continuously) could have caused the drive to spray spurious data over a section of the HDD that contains the cataloging info, but it seems like the odds are strongly against it happening to both DVRs at once, as a single incident would be exceptionally rare by itself. It sounds more like DTV screwed the pooch and is admitting as much.

Good luck. I would be righteously pissed if I went to the trouble of double-recording programs and find both DVRs missing content because of a DTV screwup.


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## Todd2 (Dec 14, 2008)

I just had a similar event happen last night I think. One of my hd-dvr's with an external drive on a UPS lost a number of shows I had recorded. Most that I remember having on there were movies recorded from the premium movie channels which I still subscribe to. I am not sure if I lost any from normal tv/locals/etc. 


I went through history and I found a couple of the shows that were there previously but they showed deleted by viewer weeks if not months ago. I know for certain they were there more recently than that. Another family member confirmed that at least one of them was there as recently as yesterday.

My free was in the mid 50% yesterday and this morning it was 84% free which is what made me look.

A call to D yielded absolutely nothing constructive.


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## Justinto (Jul 15, 2006)

I have two HR20-700s and after the update the banner does not show the program. It says that it is "upcoming" especially on HBO; however, the guide has the shows listed correctly.


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## rkr0923 (Sep 14, 2006)

This past weekends update wiped out all my recordings. Go to history and it doesn't even show they were recorded. Most of them I hadn't even watched yet.


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## mishababy (Mar 26, 2007)

I believe that happened to me too. I went to watch some shows which I was going to catch up on today. some are 3 episodes or more. They are all grey screen when I try to play them. This sucks. I am going to call and see if I can get anywhere. I was really wanting to catch up on my shows. GRRRRRRRR what good is a DVR if I cant watch the shows when I WANT to.


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## mishababy (Mar 26, 2007)

*sigh of relief* I restarted my dvr and my shows are playing Thank goodness.


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## CCarncross (Jul 19, 2005)

The 1st thing to try is a simple restart from the menu...even though you may gotten updates, the real problem is after the software installed, it reboots the unit. If the HDD was failing, during the system check during reboot, it tried to fix itself. This would have happened with a power outage as well...


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## Doug Brott (Jul 12, 2006)

Do all of you "failed" guys have an external drive? It sounds more like things went from looking at the external drive to looking at the internal drive which means (of course) that there is nothing there.


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## vandergraff (Sep 26, 2007)

Doug Brott said:


> Do all of you "failed" guys have an external drive? It sounds more like things went from looking at the external drive to looking at the internal drive which means (of course) that there is nothing there.


Just posted this is the 'HR20/21/22/23/24, H21/23/24/25 & R22 (National Release) - Issues/Discussion'

'Just catching up on some shows from wk 5/16 - 5/21 - about 4 shows on our main HR10-200 all say 'The episode was deleted because of a problem retaining the program (2004)'. No-one deleted the programs - I did ask the cats to check - it seems this was the same week as the update - any ideas what is going on?'

I don't have an external drive. No problems before or since - all the deleted shows were 'recorded' during the wk 5/16 - 5/21.


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## Art7220 (Feb 4, 2004)

Yeah, good reason not to trust those things. The stations can do anything they want to the PVRs. Either transfer the programs to a VCR or a computer.

And didn't someone have a UFC PPV deleted from their DVR a while back?


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## CCarncross (Jul 19, 2005)

vandergraff said:


> Just posted this is the 'HR20/21/22/23/24, H21/23/24/25 & R22 (National Release) - Issues/Discussion'
> 
> 'Just catching up on some shows from wk 5/16 - 5/21 - about 4 shows on our main HR10-200 all say 'The episode was deleted because of a problem retaining the program (2004)'. No-one deleted the programs - I did ask the cats to check - it seems this was the same week as the update - any ideas what is going on?'
> 
> I don't have an external drive. No problems before or since - all the deleted shows were 'recorded' during the wk 5/16 - 5/21.


Can you provide a specific example of a show? Perhaps there is an explanation that could be found if you provided a specific example.


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## vandergraff (Sep 26, 2007)

CCarncross said:


> Can you provide a specific example of a show? Perhaps there is an explanation that could be found if you provided a specific example.


A couple of them were The Event & NCIS LA - neither that big a loss - but worrying in case we lose something we really care about. All the missing/deleted shows were scheduled to record during the same wk 5/16 - 5/21.


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