UPDATE So apparently, the repair man did not have to reformat my HR-20! YAY! He redownloaded the software for the unit and that seemed to have fixed the problem. He said that he has seen this before - sometimes the reinstall of software works - sometimes they have to labotomize the box. I'm glad...

he apologetically said "you will lose everything on the disk". so he must have meant "reformat the drive".

so the directv repair man is at my house (second time) for a repair call. He is telling me that he has to do a hard reset on the HD-DVR due to a software glitch that is causing one of my satellite inputs to not function properly (or something close to that). He says this is the only way to fix...