For the last month or so, my Series3 has been freezing up while I was watching already recorded shows (never anything I was watching live), and then rebooting. This has been very random and it didn't seem to matter whether the recording was HD or SD, what I was doing (fast forward, 30-second skip, etc), what channel it was from, etc. But after the reboot everything was fine, until it would freeze again.

I have a WD My DVR expander external drive attached, and sometimes, after the reboot would begin, I'd get a message that the S3 wasn't finding the external drive. Powercycling usually took care of the problem, but now it does not. I'm loathe to lose anything that might be on the external drive, so I don't want to start up without it, as I understand that causes me to loose everything on the external.

I'm hoping its just the cable, but I can't test that until I can get to a store tomorrow and buy another one. Is there anything I can do in the meantime (ie, some way to test the drives)?

And, if the issue is the external drive, as seems to be likely from reading some of the threads, is there any way to safely get the data off it?

Thanks in advance for any assistance!