re, standby

[chris31560]

hi guys, a friend of mine has a sky+ box the old white one, now thing is he is out of contract with sky but the box is stuck on standby red light on and it wont move, anybody any idea,s has to how to fix without the massive bill from sky to sort it..cheers..chris.

[Manic01]

From AV Forums.

There's one 'public' fix that Sky will tell you - try switching the box off at the mains, holding down the 'backup' button and turning the power back on (as you continue to hold the backup button down). This is *supposed* to force the Sky box to do a reset and download a software update. However, I've never seen this work with this problem.

The solution I've used is one which will WIPE YOUR SKY BOX - but if you get the box sent off to Sky or get an engineer to visit you'll lose all your programmes anyway, so you've not much choice...

What annoys me is that Sky won't tell you this fix - they'd rather you pay for an engineer to come out who may just try this anyway...

To perform a full reset and format the disk:
1) Switch off the box at the mains
2) Whilst holding down the left and right arrows on the front of the box (either side of the Select switch), power on the box. After a second or two, the Sky 'ring' will light.
3) hit the 'Select' button on the front panel - this will reformat the drive and reset the box. This can take a few minutes and the ring will 'whirl' backwards to show it's working.

[nibblitz]

Stuck on standby is usually a PSU fault. He'll probably be best buying a secondhand Sky+HD box on ebay, they sell for around 30 quid or so, then he can simply call Sky to get them to pair his card to it. He'll then have a better box with HDMI output and also be able to watch some HD channels..