So I wake up this mourning and turn on my TV/DVR. Low and behold, I receive an empty screen. I clicked "Info" thinking that I may have accidentally clicked on a channel that I hadn't order when I turned the DVR off last night. It tells me that I'm on ABC. Weird. Then, thinking that the channel could be having an issue, I changed it to CBS. Nothing. I then assumed that for whatever reason my service was temporarily down, but to make sure I went into my "Playlist" and clicked on one of my recorded shows. Black screen. Then, just to make sure that it wasn't simply because the satellite was down, I went to a regular receiver that I have in my bedroom and turned it on. It works just fine.

My DVR worked perfectly fine last night, so this is puzzling to me. My question is;

- Has this ever happened to you? If so, how did you fix it?

The DVR I am referring to is more specifically called "DIRECTV HD H21" Receiver. I have the 2007 model. If anyone could help it would be great, thank you.

do a reboot. red button in front. post back results.

Did you try a hard-reboot?

Mine has done this a few times recently. The only fix I've found is a reboot.

Worked like a charm. Thanks!

I'm pretty sure a solar flare (wild guess) hit the DirecTV satellite yesterday. The same thing happened to me while I was watching Sunday Night Football. In the fourth quarter the picture went blank when I jumped to another channel. And I couldn't get any other channel to show up. I checked my "list of DVR'd shows" and it showed them but wouldn't play anything I selected. I Turned my DVR on and off, still nothing.

I did a "red button" reboot and the HDDVR went through the set up procedure, acquiring the satellite connection, etc.. A few minutes went by and the picture came back. All is good now. I freaked out for a second thinking I lost everything on the DVR... I'm in the process of transferring stuff off the HDDVR to DVD, I would be pissed if it took a dump on me before I transfered everything over.

i didn't have any problems with SNF last night.

mine did the exact same thing this morning. hit the red button and then left for work so I don't know if it is fixed.

Last night when I got home I had a similar problem. I turned it on at 7:25 to a black screen with a caller ID message from 7:05. I hit EXIT and it went to a message telling me that it had to change the channel because it was going to record two shows. I hit EXIT again and it starts recording. It should have been recording Chuck and How I Met Your Mother at 7, but both recordings started at 7:26. Everything worked fine the rest of the night.

to follow up...

The reboot seems to have taken care of the problem. It was working fine after turning it on yesterday afternoon and again this morning. I noticed that it missed a recording in the middle of the night before the reboot yesterday. It shows in history as a partial but nothing in the recording list.

One other thing is that the box seems to be running faster. Not fast enough, but it is noticeably faster.

Has anyone suggested a reboot?

One more note about this problem...

If it happens while something is recording, your recordings should still be fine. Just wait until the red light is off before you reboot.

Not to turn this into a customer support forum, but...

how do I make sure that I only record stuff on channels I have? I use the search button to look for college football games, which are of course on dozens of regional channels.... I thought picking the ones in white meant that I had that channel, but several times now I've recorded nothing.

Maybe it's different on your model, but I always get a warning message when I attempt to set a recording on a channel I don't get.