I have a Sharp TU-R160HA Digital TV Recorder, but it now freezes up on starting up, I phoned sharp up and they told me it was the Internal Hard drive that needed replacing. How do I replace the hard drive on the digital Tv recorder does anyone know how I can do this as sharp won't because I bought it from a third party:0(

Angel, November 2009

It looks like the unit will take most standard 3.5" IDE HDD. Having just replaced mine with a 250GB model. After suffering the same problem. Easy enough, need nothing more than a philips driver and roughly 10 mins.

To access the hard drive. Remove the 6 retaining screws from the top of the case. 2 at the side, 4 across the back of the unit, and remove the top. Then unplug the ribbon cable and power cable from the HDD.
Flip the unit over and remove the 4 screws holding the hard drive brackets in place. You can now remove the HDD assembly. Remove the brackets from the HDD and attach them to your replacement drive.
then reverse the process to rebuild it.

Once completely re-assembled, power up the unit. You'll receive notification that the HDD requires formatting. Just click ok, takes a couple of mins and then you should be up and running.

Dave, July 2011

My Sharp TU-R160HA digital TV recorder has just failed in the same way. Getting the HDD replaced does't appear to be an unsurmountable problem, however I don't want to spend the money on new HDD if it needs to be specific to this machine ie is there some 'Sharp' software installed onto the HDD at the factory. Can anyone tell me if a standard replacement HDD will do? The one in the machine is a Western Digital 160Gb.

James, February 2010

Sorry - I can't help.....but I have exactly the same problem. Did you manage to fix it in the end?

Mark, February 2010