Got my DR7 for 4 years and always works fine, but it gave me a er-md41 just yesterday, I took the unit to my distributor and he said most of case there is dust on the recording head (said MD-DR7 has 2 optical head, one for reading and one for recording), he use a cotton bud dipped into pure alcohol and gentelly wiped over the head, and now my DR7 works fine again. Since this machine is about 5 years old and parts are hardly available, this could be one easy way to solve the ER problem. wish my experience can help.