the sky plus box will not come oput of the red light mode the signal light works with the hand set but nothing hellllp

sean percival, March 2008

Fixed this today.
Sky+ was stuck on standby, and the firmware upgrade (hold down backup while switching on made no difference).
I stuck the hard disk into a PC, downloaded the excellent Copy+ from http://www.skycopyplus.co.uk/, and backed the disk up (to a 260GB file). Of around 500 programmes, Copy+ reported problems on around 20 of them, so I clicked on "No - don't copy these".

You then need to remove the partition on the Sky disk, because Copy+ will only write to a clean disk. I used Windows' Disk Manager to do that.
Then I restored from my backup file. Put the disk back in the Sky unit and had an anxious ~4 minutes while it did "something" and then, tada!, it sprang into life.

No idea what caused the failure in the first place, but this method saved me losing all my recordings.

It's not a task for the faint-hearted, but if you're handy with a security Torx driver, and IDE jumpers, you'll be fine.

Scott, December 2009

I have had this happen to me several times, and I have fixed it each time by unplugging the box, then reconnecting it. Leave it ten minutes then press the button on the front of the box to start it up. Sometimes I have to do this more than once before it clears. I believe it has something to do with the auto standby built into the Sky+ box.

Kath, September 2008

i have the same problem ive tried everything to get it on but it just wont you can see the signal on the sky romote(Mind my spelling) by the light going red but yet it wont come on

Sam, August 2008