I hope I am posting this in the right forum. If not my apologies in advance. We got Dish Network & have the box with the dvr (Tivo type thingy). I had taped a bunch of stuff & protected some of it. A t-storm hit last nite & now today all my stuff stored on the dvr is gone. Sad thing is alot of it was stuff I hadn't had a chance to view yet. Is there a way to bring it back or is it gone forever? I bet it is gone forever. A couple of the most important things I saved on vhs as well. Thanks for any info. I bet it is gone forever tho. Sigh...

IF IT WAS ON A HARD DRIVE,ITS NEVER GONE,DONT MATTER IF U DELETE IT.THERES WAY TO PULL IT BACK UP .ONLY IF U HAVE A HARD DRIVE..

IF IT WAS ON A HARD DRIVE,ITS NEVER GONE,DONT MATTER IF U DELETE IT.THERES WAY TO PULL IT BACK UP .ONLY IF U HAVE A HARD DRIVE..

With Dish Network's DVR, all the stuff is encrypted, unlike other sorts of hard drive recorders.

I'd give Dish Network a call, and see if they can help.

there is a small decoder program that allows the hard drive to spit out the info just like any normal hard drive

many folks take the hard drive out and run it into their computer when they feel like doing some dvds

the hard drive comes out in a minute

4 screws and two plugs

if you have an external hard drive case, its an easy plug in--or an emoty slot on your pc

the sad part is that if lightning really got it, the hard drive may be lost anyhow

search the yahoo user groups for dish net dvr and there are many sites

i used to know this when i had one, but now i have direct and dont care about dish dvrs anymore

I've had this happen with my DVR a couple of times. Sometimes, everything is lost. If you have any shows listed at all on the recorder, try to play the first one - if it fails, delete it. Sometimes that's enough to clear the problem up for the remaining programs. If they are all gone, another thing you can try is turn the DVR off and unplug it for about 5 minutes or so - let it go completely cold. Then plug it back in and turn it on. That acts as a kind of hard boot for the DVR (just turning it off doesn't do it, as it's in standby mode). I've recovered stuff apparently lost during a storm or software update that way a couple of times in the 4 years I've had my DISH DVR. But as I said, in some cases, it's really gone, as in scrambled so you can't recover it without major technical assistance.

Good luck!

Thanks for the info ya'll. With my luck it is probably gone for good. I set it up to tape some more stuff & it's not there. I noticed tonite it said cleaning up hard drive on the dish. So I suspect maybe it got into some kind of hard drive cleaning mode & cleaned off everything for some reason...

The hard drive may have become sufficiently fragmented that the system had to clean it up. I always turn my unit off when I'm not using the DVR, and it's running on a surge protector - I learned my lesson when my favorite Sony VCR got fried during a storm, and proved to be unable to be repaired. Sigh. But I do find I have fewer problems with my DVRs if I don't leave them on all the time, and if I turn them off if it starts to storm (assuming I'm not in the middle of recording something).