Originally Posted by
rans6andrew
I am still undecided over this issue. The Humax machine did not attempt to do anything to a brand new, unformatted HDD as far as I can determine. This leaves me with two options:
1) to purchase a 1TB drive and attempt to do a clone copy. This assumes I can persuade the drive to operate by warming it a bit. I already know that it starts to work, if left connected and you keep trying to access it, as it warms up.
2) to purchase a 1/2TB drive and clone copy the drive from our other Humax machine of the same model.
In either case I am leaning towards a SSD rather than a HDD as the machine accesses the drive all of the time it is powered on and it makes a slightly annoying chortling noise. An SSD should be silent in use.
I still don't know if it is a quirk of the disk caddy that stops my Linux mint machine from seeing a totally blank drive. Maybe if mounted internally it will be seen?
I have obtained Clonezilla cloning software to allow the two options to be tried.
Rans6......
Is there anything in the Humax settings menu about "inititialising" or "formatting" a hard drive? The Humax firmware might not be clever enough to auto-detect the new drive so you might have to tell it. This could be key to getting another HDD/SSD working.
Also, if your Humax box is anything like mine, the operating system is actually the firmware and lives in the EEPROM - pretty much only recordings are saved to the HDD. It's not like a Linux or Windows PC where the OS gets installed to the HDD (although you can utilise custom firmware which does utilise the HDD for extra software). You probably have little to gain by cloning the existing box's HDD, unless you really don't want to lose your recordings, but even then you risk transferring corrupt data which could cause playback problems.