k3jls

Hello again folks. I have an AV793 DVR that is only 3 months old. It came equipped with a 500 GB Hard Drive - it's almost brand new. I let it accummulate video files until the disk was about half full and then I 'cleared' the disk using the DVR's internal disk erasing system. After I had done this, the DVR seemed to work OK, but the available memory display on the upper right side of the screen began showing more memory than the drive actually contained (e.g. 663 GB instead of 500 GB). After a week or so, the DVR began to boot whenever it tried to record anything. Right now, it's virtually useless. I spoke with the vendor (who said they were going to send me a new hard drive), and they gave me the approval and instructions to do a hardware reset. I did this and nothing improved. Tomcctv had suggested that I reformat the drive to see if this might be the problem. My question is this - can I use some program internal to the DVR to accomplish this, or must the drive be removed and reformatted on a P/C? Also, I was led to believe that DVR's in general had the capability to reformat brand new drives, as would be the case when either installing a replacement drive or an additional one. I would appreciate any suggestions - Thanks - Joe Burch

Hi Tom - many thanks. By a reformat, do you mean just an erasure? IF so, I've done this many times. Joe

Hello folks. I bought an AVTECH 973 about 3 months ago and it worked very well - until yesterday. Briefly, it has a 500 GB hard drive, and when it was working properly you could 'see' - on the upper right corner of the screen - the available hard drive space decrease as more and more memory was used up. About 1 week ago, I 'cleaned' (erased) the stored contents of the drive and, when the unit booted back up, the screen displayed something like 661 GB of available memory. It seemed to work OK for a while and then began to reboot whenever motion was detected, showing an error code of 400. The folks from whom I bought the unit (USA Security Store) told me that the problem was most likely a defective hard drive and that they would make good on the warranty, either sending me a new hard drive, or another unit. I'm still waiting for their answer (should be today). MY question is this. Where is the DVR getting the 661 GB number from? Could the problem be as simple as a software glitch that makes the DVR 'think' that it has more hard drive capacity than it really has? It may be trying to write into a hard drive address that doesn't exist. If this is the case, is there a way to reset the unit? I don't mind taking it apart. Any suggestions would be greatly appreciated as we have come to depend on this system to catch both vandals and the people who put dog crap in our trash can. Thanks - Joe Burch