thunderstorm last night, poof my DVR has no recorded programs

[thompsam]

Last night we had some thunderstorms and today when I went to watch something that was recorded on my DVR, poof the hard drive was empty.  I called uverse tech support and was told that if the DVD reboots 3 times in succession, a "feature" of my DVR is that it will reset back to its original factory settings.  I'm guessing that as my power blinked off and on last night due to the storms, this is what may have happened.

While I could flame on and on about what a stupid design this is, I'd like to ask a constructive question and see if anyone knows if it is possible to recover any of the probably 100 hours of recorded video I had on the DVR.  The level 1 person I talked to said no, it wan'st possible but I've learned not to ever trust anything a level 1 person says.   In case it matters, the DVR is a Cisco model IPN4320.

Has anyone else been in this situation and recovered from it.

Sam

[DunderMifflin]

This makes me glad I have my DVR on a UPS.  You might want to consider doing the same.

[thompsam]

What I find interesting is that when my uverse service was installed, the installer did provide a UPS and plugged my gateway into in.  This was to allow us to have 911 service for a couple of hours if the power was out.  Its sitting right behind the DVR.  If I knew about  the 3 reboots in succession feature, I most likely would have also plugged the DVR into the UPS too.

I honestly still can't get over someone making this design decision during the R&D phase of the DVR.  Just think if Lenovo, Dell, etc did the same with their computers.  Three quick Windows reboots and we'll wipe your computer's hard drive.......

Sam

[jfw ACE - Czar]

The UPS supplied by ATT powers the RG to allow for phone service only for up to 4 hours in the event of a power failure. There are no provisions on this UPS to plug a DVR or for that matter any 120v device into, you would have to purchase a separate UPS that rated for 120v applications.

[SomeJoe7777 ACE - Geek]

The reason for this behavior is to prevent a service call for a DVR that is corrupted by software only.

Basically there is a counter on the hard disk that counts the number of failed reboots.  When the box first powers up, the counter is immediately incremented, usually from 0 to 1.  After the box is fully started up and running, it runs some self-tests internally, and if everything checks out, then it resets the counter to 0.

If the box fails to start up for whatever reason, the counter never gets reset to 0 and stays at 1.  If the box is then unplugged to attempt a reboot again, the first thing the box does is increment the counter, now from 1 to 2.

If the counter ever reaches 4, the box assumes that the past 3 reboots have failed to get fully up and running and pass a self-test, and it needs to perform a disaster recovery -- format the hard disk, download a fresh installation of the OS, and try again.

Because your power failures occurred in succession with a period between the failures of less than the time required for the box to start up, the box never got to the point where it was fully started up and a valid self-test was run, so the counter was never reset to 0.  3 successive power failures of this type were interpreted as 3 failed reboots, resulting in the disaster recovery.

This is commonly programmed behavior for computer units that are supposed to be treated as an "appliance".  It is the catch-all for the box to fix itself should it even become necessary.