How to Reformat the Hard Drive on a Channel Master CM-7000PAL DVR

How to Reformat the Hard Drive on a Channel Master CM-7000PAL
How to Reformat the Hard Drive on a Channel Master CM-7000PAL

I was running into a problem where whenever I went to a specific show I had recorded the DVR would reboot.  I couldn’t even delete the offending show.  I tried restoring to factory settings but that doesn’t delete any recordings and didn’t solve the problem.  I then decided that I needed to reformat the hard drive.  I had the hardest time finding where you go in the menus to reformat the hard drive and could not find it anywhere in the pdf manual (which oddly you cannot do a text search in because of the way the text is encoded) so once I found it I wanted to document it for myself and anyone else who needed to do it.

How to Reformat the Hard Drive on a Channel Master CM-7000PAL DVR

Hardware:

Step 1: Press the “pal” button on the Channel Master remote.

This ensures that the remote is in the DVR mode (versus controlling the TV, VCR, or AUX).

Step 2: Press menu on the Channel Master remote.

Step 3: Select “Setup” from the on-screen menu and press the SELECT button (or press 3 on the numerical keypad).

 Step 4: Select “System Setup” from the on-screen menu and press the SELECT button (or press 2 on the numerical keypad).

Step 5: Select “Diagnostics” from the on-screen menu and press the SELECT button (or press 6 on the numerical keypad).

 Step 6: Select “HDD” from the on-screen menu and press the SELECT button.

 Step 7: Select “Reformat” from the on-screen menu and press the SELECT button.

 Step 8: Select “Yes” from the on-screen menu and press the SELECT button.

It doesn’t take it long to reformat, and while it is formatting this is what you will see:
After reformatting the DVR will reboot.
This solved my problem too, which was a big relief except that we lost all the kids shows we had recorded.

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1 Comment

  • Thanks for posting this. I’m not sure I would have ever found how to do this in the menu system.

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