Good question; I'm convinced a lot of problems posted are due to users not being aware or understanding how the equipment works and one could argue on a consumer product they shouldn't really have to, we don't talk about rebooting a washing machine or toaster.
in my book...
A power cycle or cold reboot is where the power is physically disconnected. This should clear out volatile memory and the system will initialise components on booting up.
Putting it into standby or a warm reboot doesn't actually switch the device off or remove the power, the power is never cycled, it's still always powered up, disks will spin down, but still have power to them. Without removing the power certain states can remain the same and won't get cleared. This is particularly important with things like network, dongles, controllers etc. that can muck up and stay mucked up over warm reboots / in-out of standby. If it's a value that's been read from ROM and put into RAM on bootup and got corrupted later then no amount of in and out of standby will fix it until it's re-initialised following a cold reboot / power cycle.
Add into the mix a cold reboot where the power is left disconnected for a while? Or is that a short while, little while, a while, a long while, a piece of string comes to mind...
Even with the power disconnected components will retain a charge, it can be milli-seconds, minutes, hours etc. so it can become useful to know how much of a while it was left unplugged for.
In post #7 there's mention of left unplugged for a while. In post #10 unplugging for a little while.
This is exactly the reason for my question as to whether it was power cycled between trying standby and unplugging for a while.
Repassac sorted his by putting it in/out of standby, Graham had the power disconnected for 30 minutes and while this worked for Graham it begs the question how long does it actually need to be unplugged for.
If a power cycle didn't work and it needed to be left unplugged for a while then that would indicate something needs to discharge, cool down or settle down as a cold reboot is the same process be it after 10 seconds or 10 days.
I'm sure Repassac would have waited for the disk to spin down after putting it into standby, so again there's a time element here.
The scary thing here is I'm sure people will be tempted to or maybe even advised by CS to factory reset and reformat and magically everything is back working again
I often think that before starting a new topic there should be tick boxes to be tried in order,
1) put in/out of standby and waited for disk to stop inbetween
2) power cycled
3) router rebooted for network related problems
4) router power cycled for network problems
5) on latest firmware
6) factory reset without formatting
however this would probably come across as patronising, but even a 'things to check before posting a new topic' would help
Going back to the OP of initially YouTube not working and subsequent notice of recordings missing is clearly worrying. Memory leakage and temporary files getting too big also spring to mind, shame we don't have access to the file system and/or OS
