Oh joy, when we received our Bell PVR.  We even bought a backup drive to use for archiving our favourite shows. 
Sore points:
-Bell encrypts all movies saved for archive.
-Our backup drive disappears from the pvr menu when the pvr is turned off and on requiring the backup drive to be unplugged and replugged in to be recognized. If this process is done too fast (wait a few seconds before plugging in your external drive again) you get a message that the drive needs to be formatted in error. Do not reformat or you will lose your movies on the external drive.  Instead do as stated above and simply unplug and wait a few seconds longer before plugging it back in this time.
-Most recently our external drive was not being recognized as compatible.  I tried rebooting the drive with no luck and finally reformatted using my computer.  It was still not being seen as compatible (and I had lost my archived movies in the process).  Gave my PVR a reboot and everything was back to normal with a working external backup drive once formatted.  My advice. Try unplugging the PVR first if this happens to you and save all your movies.

Virus scanners can be as tricky as virus's. After following every recommendation for repairing corrupted Kaspersky Internet Security 2011, I ended up updating to the 2012 edition. This was available through the global site for free to existing licensees and should be available on North American sites as early as August, 2011. Frustrating that they didn't list upgrade as a suggested fix, it is still 2011 afterall and the 2011 version works fine on my Vista but crapped out on my XP.

On the matter of finding the 2012 version for the vista I was unable to seek out the download on the global site from that machine. It would automatically direct me to the US site where it is not yet available. Strange.

     Well. Trying to be a wise guy I thought it would be fun to put puppy linux on my gigabeat S media player.  I had done this easily before with a Gigabeat F10 and it worked real sweet. Just copied my puppy files over from and existing usb install, used makeboot.bat to make it bootable and plugged the Gigabeat into a desktop with no internal drive. Syslinux took over and boot started fine. After a few seconds the "Beast" started to wipe the drive clean and reformat. This is apparently due to Toshiba's strict set of rules attached to bootloader format used on the Gigabeat described here. (similar to Isaac Azimov's "Three Laws of Robotics")

     Went back to toshiba's support site......nothin'.  Soooo, I took a look at the Gigabeat S info at http://www.rockbox.org/wiki/GigabeatSInfo . The firmware can be restored using this MESV12US.zip containing the iso file required . Just follow the instructions on the site as:

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     Extract the iso with your favorite extractor (7zip for example).
You get 2 files : Autorun.inf and gbs_update_1_2_us.exe
Extract the exe file with 7zip for example and you get the following files : nk.bin , recovery.bin ,pmcboot_secure.bin plus a folder named 'us' containing License.txt and SUpdate.exe

If you just want to recover the original firmware, run the exe file and follow the instructions.

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    Now that the original firmware was restored I decided to go ahead and install rockbox along with the Gigabeat S firmware so I had a mega-super-dualboot media player. This process is outlined clearly in the rockbox Gigabeat S Manual.

     I hope this proves useful to someone. Perhaps someone who purchased a "broken" Gigabeat S from Ebay or just another guy who just doen't know where to stop like myself.

.....uhmmmm. Oh, yeah.  Welcome to my new blog where I can rant, rave and review.  Not much to write about at the moment but soon I will post linux distro reviews for the newbie in all of us and rant or rave about my latest vacation video edit.  Perhaps when it is done I will have many insights to share.