How To Repair The Digihome DTR80 80GB Freeview Recorder (stuck on starting)

Had a few problems with this and it hadn’t been working for a while. Nothing came on the TV and the little display on the device itself was stuck on “starting”.

I have found a solution so thought I would post it here 🙂

Open the six screws on the outer case and then pull it up and off to get access to the hard drive. Turn the device over and undo the four screws that are holding the harddrive to the case. Remove the harddrive power and data connection cables.

Plug the hard drive into a pc – note that the hard drive will not show up like a normal hard drive does. Also note that you do not need to change the jumper settings on the drive itself normally.

Go to control panel then “administrative tools” (sometimes in system and maintenance category). Go to “computer management” and click on “disk management”. Find the hard drive – your pc probably won’t have assigned a drive letter to it so it will be the one without any. Right click on and delete both of the partitions on the drive. Now right click it again and format it – make sure the file system is NTFS.

Once it is done take the device out of the pc and put it back into the DTR80 case. Plug in the harddrive cables and the screws etc as above. Now when you re-connect the device to your tv and turn it on you will get a message saying “this device requires a format, do you want to perform this now”. Use the controller to select “yes”. Give it a few minutes until the timer is displayed on the front and then press the “on” button on your controller. Job done!

If the device is working fully and you want to format it for any other reason there is an easier way to do it – go to the menus and setup – recordings page then select format disk.