Fault-finding
The system has stopped recording
A worn-out hard drive is the most common reason a CCTV system stops recording, ahead of a schedule someone disabled and a drive that filled up with overwrite turned off. Open the recorder's storage page first: a drive listed as absent, error or unformatted is your answer, and every one of these faults is inexpensive to fix.
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Step 1: read the drive status page
Every recorder reports drive health under storage or HDD settings. A drive showing missing, unformatted or error is the fault, and no amount of camera checking will change it. Surveillance drives writing around the clock last three to five years, and the abrupt cuts and voltage dips that come with IESCO outages shave time off that. If the recorder has also started beeping, it is telling you the same thing.
Step 2: confirm the recording schedule
Schedules get switched off during some past bit of troubleshooting and never switched back on, and the system then sits silent for months with nobody aware. Open the schedule grid and confirm every channel is set to record around the clock, or on motion if that was the design. This check costs nothing, takes two minutes, and turns out to be the whole problem more often than a failed drive does.
Step 3: check the overwrite setting
A recorder with overwrite disabled simply stops when the drive fills, which on a busy system can be a couple of weeks after installation. Switching overwrite on resumes recording immediately at the cost of the oldest footage, which is how every recorder is meant to run. If you need history the drive cannot hold, the honest fix is a larger drive, not a setting.
Why is my CCTV not recording anything?
How do I know when the drive actually failed?
Scroll the playback calendar. Footage that exists up to one date and nothing after marks the day the drive gave up, and the recorder's log will usually confirm it.
Can anything be recovered from a dead CCTV drive?
Sometimes, depending on how it failed. When footage matters we attempt recovery before fitting a new drive, but a disk that ground away on bad sectors for weeks rarely gives much back.
Rather have it done?
Security camera repair covers black screens, recorders that stopped writing, lost phone access after an internet change, and footage that will not play back. Most faults trace to power, connectors or settings rather than a dead camera. Callout in Islamabad or Rawalpindi starts at PKR 3,000, with the full fix priced before any work.
Security camera repair in Islamabad — prices and scope