JW.LEES - 4 hours ago »
Hi, I have the FVP-5000T 1TB model with a similar fault, ..[snip].. I would appreciate your advice please before I use it as a Frisbee.
Is it still under guarentee? I think the 5000T has a 2 year manufacturer warranty???
First big if : Do you have means to connect the PVR HDD to a PC or raspberry Pi running a Linux based operating system? The internal hard disk is formatted EXT4 (or EXT3) and Windows won't read that natively (I don't think?). If yes, I'd be looking to see if I could extract some recordings from the HDD and put them on a USB flash drive just to see if the PVR will play them. If I could play files this way but not while the drive was inside the PVR, I'd assume the 5000T to be end of life.
Second big if : Do you happen to have a spare SATA drive hanging around? If so, swap it in the PVR and see if you can format it.
One thing I wouldn't do is buy a HDD specially unless I knew first for certain that the original was duff.
If you can't do any of the above, then did you see the option to do a "Reset All Settings and format HDD"?
Freeview play / Settings / System settings / Factory Default.
It didn't help anything for me though as this machine can't see the internal drive at all.
Final thought : if you are going to use the 5000T as a frisbee, it might go further without its internal hard disk? 
Best of luck.
