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:

• Channel Master CM-7000PAL DVR

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

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.