I've been watching the EEV Blog videos by David Jones recently and was inspired by some of his repairs to give it a go myself. I found an old hard disk recorder, a Hitachi HDR080 that I'd stuffed away in a dark corner of my spare room. It had completely died a few years ago. There was no power getting to either the hard disk or the front control panel. I suspected a power supply failure a first inspection revealed an electrolytic capacitor with a domed top. You can see the offending capacitor in the photo below left. I found a spare and replaced it. It's the big black on the left of the centre photo below.
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This did the trick and the recorder powered up. Unfortunately it failed to properly tune in all the channels. Playback was fine but recording a new channel gave it problems. A bit of an internet search revealed that in 2012 my local TV transmitter had it's analogue signal turned off. Even though my recorder has a digital tuner this causes problems for some reason. I did try searching for a firmware update, but to no avail. According to some forums Hitachi did offer to upgrade the software if you sent your unit back, but that was more than 3 years ago so I think I will call this one a done. A successful repair, but unfortunately scuppered by things out of my control :-x
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