MRDVR issues, Some Venting & Some Quesitons

Question

I'm having problems with my HDDVR as follows:
On almost a daily basis, I have to unplug the HDDVR in order for the SD Boxes to see the DVR content.  At those same times, the HDDVR cannot access VOD until it is unplugged & re-connected to power.
Here's a strange one... the series manager won't stop recording at "Keep up to ### episodes" setting.  I have one series that was set to ###=14, it was up to 26 episodes before I started deleting them. Another was at 18, when set to ###-10.  
Finally, and I thought myself crazy at the time, but it's happened again, when I was deleting programs from the "Iron Chef America" series, the DVR jumped over to the "Iron Chef [Japan]" series and deleted an episode I definitely wanted to keep.  Only realized this when it came back to the main screen after deleting the episode it wsa showing ICJ shows and one was missing.  None were missing from ICA.  ??Is there any way to retrieve it??  e.g., a Recently Deleted folder?  I'm not kidding, it really did just that.  Wife and kids saw it happen the second time (after I had recorded the next-in-line episode).  This one sounds too screwed up, so I didn't even bother bringing it up to VZ... especially considering they didn't fully address the first two points yet.
I am anticipating that my next contact with VZ will be to have them schedule a day/time to replace either or both my router and/or HDDVR.  Unfortunately, I am faced with over 30 hours of recordings to be preserved, before I can even schedule VZ to replace my HD box... and this recording has to happen in real-time.  I do have a Sony RDR-VX530 VCR/DVD Recorder, and I can fit around 12 1/2-hour episodes per DVD-RW, so it's not the media cost that's pi$$ing me off, it's just that the time investment needed to make all the recordings, edit the menu's and titles on the resulting DVD's, etc, is a pain in the {word filter avoidance}
Forgetting warranties etc., Could a person temporarily pull the hard drive from the box and just image it onto another drive for backup purposes, assuming I have an extra HD and the SW to do it, of course?  At least I could then do the recording without time pressure.  For that matter, could they then replace the painfully small hard drive with the one just imaged it onto?
Anyone know when VZ is rolling out External HD capability?  Followup question:  will I be able to take that External HD to my PC and edit/author personal use DVD's, or is it in proprietary format not readable by Nero or similar?  If they are, I may just hold off and not follow up on these issues until I have that updated sw/hw in my hands.
I have been on the phone a number of times and the last call was the most thorough, but did NOT uncover any underlying problem.  He had me log on the router and watch the signal levels, looking for any abnormal low's... there were none.  Router initially didn't see the HDDVR (funny enough the DVR *DID* see VOD menu's & programming).  Unplugged and power-cycled the DVR, refreshed the browser with router stats and it finally showed up.  He claimed he did some kind of remote reset, that did NOT delete any DVR programs, and to follow up if that didn't work.  No "next step would be xxxxxxxx",  just that's all we can do here.  Side note, I had the exact same problem THAT VERY NIGHT.
If you've gotten this far, thank you for reading!  I look forward to any comments, answers.
SJM

Answer 1

Update:  after resetting both the router and DVR, I go online and get the message "bad gateway" when trying to access the DVR online VZ website.
It just keeps getting better!