Not formatting or playing finalised discs

I have a Panasonic DMR EZ25 recorder which I got about 18 months ago. Since the day I got it, there were silly little things that bugged me. For example, I'd go into Guide, select my profile for my channels and that would be fine - till the next time I went into Guide it had gone back to all categories. It would do this all the time, then suddenly, it would be OK and stay on the selected programme - till there was a channel update and then I'd be back to having to re-select my profile every time.

It was also throwing up a U80 error code every now and again.

There were a couple of occassions that when I finalised a disc I'd find that I'd lost everything on it. I just assumed that it was maybe a faulty disc.

I also find that I keep getting bad or no signal on certain channels - which is weird since the TV is fine and the aerial is actually direct into the DVD recorder - I would have thought that if I was going to get a poor signal it would have been on the TV.

I finalised a disc to take and watch on my other DVD player. It worked fine on that. Took it back to the Panasonic and it came up saying that the disc wasn't formatted correctly. There were still programmes on it I wanted to watch, so I copied them over to my PC and copied them back onto a fresh disc, thinking maybe there was a problem with the disc they were on. It still came up saying that the disc wasn't formatted correctly. I checked it on my PC and the other DVD player and it plays fine.

So I went to format some other discs and it's taking ages and then eventually says that formatting was unsuccessful. It's doing it with every disc I put in it now.

I've cleaned the lens and made sure the discs are all clean.

It's playing discs that were recorded and finalised before this problem occurred, but anything finalised after it, it won't play.

And I'm gutted that I've left it so long - I thought there was a 5 year guarantee on it (same as the TV I got) so I didn't rush out to get the original problem looked at cos it didn't seem major - now of course, it's out of guarantee!

Does anyone have any ideas what might be wrong with it?

Many thanks,

Alison