Clearing everything Three hours ago I attempted to "clear everything" from the menu option and three hours later I'm still faced with a message that reads simply, "This will take an hour." I have unplugged all of the everything from the rear of the unit including the power cord for more than fifteen minutes and after powering the unit back up, I get the welcome screen, the almost there screen and then back to the hour screen. Nothing I've done has freed the unit and I know it to be working the moment before I decided unwisely to clear everything. Help. Please?

A DVR has a small computer built in. When you run the clear everything option, this feature reinitialized the computer Hard Disk Drive doing a limited format. A format of a Hard Drive is always a slow process which normally takes 45 minutes to 1.5 hours on a 40 GB drive. Yours will actually take longer since it is larger (250 GB for 200 hours recording time), so I wouldn't panic yet. As long as you have a flashing red light on the box, it IS still formatting. If it goes beyond 8 hours, I would suspect you might have a problem or have been having some problem before (that motivated you to use clear everything).If, after 8 hours, it hasn't completed the format (red light flashing) then I would pull the cover on your DVR and pull and reseat the EIDE cable on the Hard Drive. Then restart again. Dirty contacts can cause this problem as well. Put the cover back on, do a hard restart and let it run again. If after another 8 hours, the problem still persists, then you may be experiencing read/write data errors on the drive. A failed or failing Hard Drive is most likely the culprit and it will have to be replaced. www.weaknees.com sells pre formatted and loaded Tivo Hard drives. If this is a Western Digital Drive, I would replace it with a Maxtor from them since the Maxtor are a special design just for DVR's.