Really amazing: it works perfectly! It seems that the camcorder loves to be done a spanking! I used to copy videotapes on a PC in the basement of my house: to much humidity and moistures...

Sweeeet! Worked like a charm!

Incredible how it worked !!!! Thanks a lot

june 24, 2007 you're all freakin crazy i had the same problem and followed what you did, smack my sony dcr trv 280 5 times when i powered it on, as if it made a self reset and so i entered the correct date and to my surprized the warning error disappeared and my sony functioned perfectly weird!!!!! and by the way, thanks for that

WOW, It worked!!!!!!!

Omg you are a savior! Same error but only with a certain tape took battery out, unplugged waited about thirty minutes and chunked it off the fifth floor. Damn thing splintered into a thousand pieces and I saved a ton of money on my car insurance. lol actually got message on one tape only. Havent yet banged it but Im willing to try. unplugged no battery in it.

IT WORKS!!!! THANKS..SLAPT MY CAMERA WITH THE PALM OF MY HANDS 2 TIMES. WORKS FAB :)

amazing, i wish everything was like this haha :D thanks for the kickass technique, now my old tr517 works again, i used to have a c:31:22 and 20 errors, and now, after I smacked it for about 3 minutes, it works :]

Wow i thought you guys were joking around, but it works,hit it on the table and on my knee and the cam is doing fine now. laterrrrrrrrrrr

Add one more to the big pile of believers. Recently I was able to fix my Sony Cybershot W5 digital camera error message by slapping it around. I was slightly incredulous. But then I got the C:31:23 error on my Sony TRV27 video camera and Google led me to this site. After slapping it around real good a few times, sure enough, it sprang back to life. While part of me is glad that I have been able to fix these problems with such a simple (although barbaric) fix, I will almost certainly never buy another Sony product after being stymied by bogus error messages like these.