Humax hard disk freeview box

[rans6andrew]

We have a couple of these machines which are two or three years old. One of them has a 1TB hard drive, the other a .5TB hard drive, both are rotating platter thingies. The units are the same model as far as can be seen.

Both are fairly full of recorded stuff.

The 1TB unit has thrown a wobbler last evening when the picture and sound suddenly stopped and then became intermittent at a slow rate, pausing for several tens of seconds between 1 or 2 seconds of play. There was the sound of the hard disk access suggesting that a recording that had been set was still happening. We left it to recover and went to bed. Today the machine goes through the waking up procedure but never completes.............. There are some of the expected screen messages showing the waking up process and it gets to the second part of what it should do from memory and then... nothing.

Some questions:

If I return it to Humax for repair will they lose all of the recorded material?

If I remove the drive from the faulty machine might I be able to read the files off it with anything I have to hand? I have a disk caddy to USB unit which can power up a disk drive and allow access to the files IF the format is common to either a Win8 PC or my Linux Mint machines.

Is there any point in swapping the drive from the bad unit to the good unit to see what happens? As the drives are different sizes I wonder if anything else in the machines is different to allow the OS to load, bios settings not on the disk could cause both machines to end up broken .....

Anyone?

Rans6....................................................... ..............

[Tocsin]

Most DVR boxes use a proprietary format for recording - unlikely to work for slotting into a PC or Mac, Linux may be a possibility. You may though have a better chance of swapping into the other box, but beware of it 'assuming' a new drive and wanting to format it...

It's a while since I've looked, but it may be worth asking/ browsing on the DVR sites - e.g. digital spy or avforums?

[Loose rivets]

Are you sure you want to spend on an obsolete device?

Humax I see has stopped making the Freeview offerings.
I've been given two Humax boxes. One labelled FOXSAT 6004454 I have no idea what age it is. I suppose it must be possible to drive it skilfully but compared to a little Bush unit, the menus are painfully obscure.

Sorry to hijack your thread, but it's kind of relevant.

Both have sound that's so bad that I can not use them and chat on the internet seems to say this is a common problem with HUMAX.

What is more, this insane trick of putting daft sounds over programs seems much much worse on this system. We've discussed the basic problem on PPRuNe, and it seemed to have got a little better in the last year or so. A few weeks ago it came back with a vengeance. Unusable on FreeSat for me.

[rans6andrew]

It is not a matter of spending on an obsolete device, we have two of these units and rather a lot of recorded material which we can't record again until the repeats come around. Additionally when I bought them they were the only offering on the shelves with SCART connection, our two TVs have only SCART or terrestrial aerial inputs. The sound outputs, which I feed to a good set of amplifiers and speakers, are good enough quality for most programme material.

For what the units cost me at the time they were a good find.

[Jhieminga]

I did a quick Google for 'Humax Hard Drive Replacement' and found some interesting sites and videos. One suggested that you can replace the hard drive on these boxes (with a new one, which will be reformatted), then fit the old one in a USB enclosure and connect it to the Humax box to transfer the recordings. I don't know if that would apply to your models, but it might be worth investigating.

[papabravowhiskey]

It is not a matter of spending on an obsolete device, we have two of these units and rather a lot of recorded material which we can't record again until the repeats come around. Additionally when I bought them they were the only offering on the shelves with SCART connection, our two TVs have only SCART or terrestrial aerial inputs. The sound outputs, which I feed to a good set of amplifiers and speakers, are good enough quality for most programme material.

For what the units cost me at the time they were a good find.
You can get HDMI-to-SCART adaptors that work quite well: we used one with a cable TV system and a DVD player to keep an older B&O TV going (TV didn't have a digital tuner!)

[spekesoftly]

If I remove the drive from the faulty machine might I be able to read the files off it with anything I have to hand? I have a disk caddy to USB unit which can power up a disk drive and allow access to the files IF the format is common to either a Win8 PC or my Linux Mint machines. Rans6....................................................... ..............

The hard drive on many (if not all) Humax boxes is formatted EXT3, so I suggest trying to access the files with your Linux machine might be worth a try.

[11277m]

I bought a cheap Humax 1100s freesat box a couple of years ago. It has just one tuner and comes without a hard drive, so you have to plug your own into the usb port.
Obviously with just one tuner can either watch or record, but not both at the same time.

When I first wanted to record a prog I plugged in a small (120GB) disc and that soon became full. I understand that the HDD is locked to the humax machine and I didn't want to risk trying to have two drives registered in case it will only recognise one HDD so I found a larger (500GB) drive and used Macrium reflect to clone the small drive onto the large one, then expanded the partition using diskpart to the full drive capacity and that's working fine now.

You could try removing the current HDD and clone it to a blank drive and see if that works in your Humax machine. I guess it depends on whether the fault is the Humax or the HDD. How about putting another HDD in the machine and then asking Humax to repair it, thus keeping your recordings safe?

[11277m]

... to keep an older B&O TV going (TV didn't have a digital tuner!)

Yes, I have a couple of Toshiba 32Z44B TV's. They are 32 inch flat screen CRT machines that need two people to lift! They are extremely well built and were, I believe, something like £550 about 20 years ago. I paid £30 and £11 for them on ebay ten years ago and I'm reluctant to get rid of them.

[Loose rivets]

When finally disposing of them keep the degaussing coils. Opened carefully enough there's a lifetime's supply of the most beautiful copper wire.

I understand the need to save recorded material. I had a Phillips tape system with Hot Gossip on it. All I needed was the obsolete recorder to play it on.

My hearing is so badly damaged now I suppose I can't accept anything but perfect audio, which of course, rarely occurs. However, before Covid, I did visit the friend that gave me one of them and his audio was 'acceptable'.

He also gave me a small Sony amp with ~ 12" high speakers. Just with a phono hookup all I do is amplify the degraded sound. For a fair time I've just given up, but with the restrictions I need to get something workable. A sound box is out of the question but I guess Bluetooth earpieces might work.

I suppose there are very few TV's these days with good speakers. It's a really bad step back for me, I used to feed the VHS into my hi-fi and get superb sound. I recorded the 'Making Of', Cecilia Bartoli's Vivaldi album and the VHS was astonishingly better than the CD.

I gess the thing now is to find the preferred new Satellite box and find out what the sound is like.

[PAXboy]

When I had a problem with my first Human Freeview, I got help here: My Humax forum (https://myhumax.org/forum/)

[Specaircrew]

I've successfully repaired a couple of Humax recorders by replacing the faulty hard drive, you simply swap the drive and the operating system will format it and sort itself out on power up. You might have to pre format the drive in EXT3 on certain models though. As for recovering the data, it might be worth cloning the old drive to see if the Humax box will recognise it on boot up but failing that you'll need to extract the video files from the old drive to play on a PC using the appropriate software.
Don't send the box to Humax as they won't save the data and the cost will be prohibitive compared with the cost of a new drive or even a new box.

[Background Noise]

Is there any point in swapping the drive from the bad unit to the good unit to see what happens? As the drives are different sizes I wonder if anything else in the machines is different to allow the OS to load, bios settings not on the disk could cause both machines to end up broken ......

We have had several of these over the years. Upgrades have been down to wanting higher resolution, eg freeviewHD, but most often due to failure. You can disconnect the hard drive power and data leads and see if it boots up, which might diagnose a HD failure, and at least you then have the tuner if you need it. If the HD has failed you can easily put in a new one, but you may not be able to access the old recordings on a PC. Older boxes had proprietary recording formats although there was a lot of info online about how to rip them to a useable format on a PC.

New boxes are not expensive and have many new features - we can now record 4 channels and watch a fifth! Although the EPG and other controls have taken a massive backward step.

Another Humax forum is https://hummy.tv/forum/

[11277m]

When finally disposing of them keep the degaussing coils. Opened carefully enough there's a lifetime's supply of the most beautiful copper wire. I suppose there are very few TV's these days with good speakers.

Yes,LR, perhaps I should remove some of the components for safe storage, just in case. There's a lot of quality stuff in there. Even the speakers are a half-decent size, especially compared to modern stuff which is so often simply unacceptable. For the TV in the kitchen I found a pair of computer speakers, with internal amp, solved the problem economically. In another room, having paid £250 for a freesat HD 32 inch TV I next had to spend £99 for a soundbar, which likes to think it's in a cinema and unreasonably boosts the bass. I'm thinking of plugging up the bass port with blutack.

I've been amazed to compare the prices of TV's over the years, since the early 1970's when a middle-of-the-road colour TV cost about £250, when £250 was a lot of money. Since then they have remained pretty much the same price, even now when £250 isn't much money at all.

[Loose rivets]

It wasn't too long before my mother and her aunt got a TV for our Walton on the Naze home. It needed a huge pole in the garden for the H aerial. After a year the tube went soft and my poor folk had to watch the coronation under a blanket. Line hold and frame hold dropped out every few minutes.

Finally £20 was found for a tube and the set was still around for Quatermass, where at one exciting moment I had to solder in a new EHT rectifier. I never bothered to bolt the chassis in, and the back had long gone, so it was done in just over the time it took for the iron to heat.
For the exciting new channel I ran an EHT-disabled chassis under the set and fed I.F. via coax into the 12" Ekco. It worked a treat, though changing channels was a chore.

The last set in the family home was a 21" Sony which we'd had for years. The sound on that was so good that I seldom fed it into the hi-fi. Bloke carried it out of our almost empty house for £20. It was still warm.

I never dreamed there'd be a time when I couldn't fettle my own sets. Even my contemporary at telly-school, shut down his workshop part of his business. His techie was spending most of his time waiting for someone's set to go wrong.

[Stu666]

Something to try - if your Humax box is anything like mine, it probably has timeshifting enabled. This is basically live backgound recording of the current channel, so that you can pause and rewind live TV. If the HDD has a fault, it is likely to cause problems with timeshift, which could manifest in freezing etc. If enabled, try disabling timeshift to see if this improves the functionality of the box. This may allow you check the integrity of your recordings and plan your next move.

If the HDD is in a sorry state, then it is likely that the cost of professional data recovery would far outweigh your desire to save recorded material. If you're lucky you might be able to hook it up to a PC capable of reading Linux partitions, but this is likely to be slow and painful and recovered files may well be corrupt.

Personally I would just stick a replacement HDD in the Humax box and format/initialise via the Humax settings menu, and write the old recordings off.

[rans6andrew]

I dug out my Disk Caddy (allows any sort of disc drive hardware to connect to a USB) and plugged the drive from the dodgy Humax into it. Initially there was no recognition of the drive being there and the drive felt to be vibrating a lot (by finger touch) but not at the 5000 odd rpm it should have been running at. After a while (about half an hour), as it warmed up, it was suddenly seen by my Linux Mint computer and three partitions or directories appeared. Two of only 4GB and 41GB which appear to be empty and one of 930GB which seems to be pretty full although I can't actually access any of the three directories in it. These are Music, Photos and Videos which it shows as "loading" but never gets there. The fact that I can read these tells me that the disc formatting is compatible with my Linux machine, which is a relief.

I have seen this before on a drive from a laptop computer. I accessed that one by warming the drive up to 50 or 60 degrees in the oven and then putting it into the caddy and repeatedly attempting to access it until, as it cooled down, it became fully readable for just long enough to copy all of the wanted data from it. Obviously a case of the oil in the bearings getting a bit claggy but softening up when warmed.

Right now I don't have a spare drive big enough to drop the 930GB of good stuff onto, the largest drive in my spares box is only 500GB. I think it is time to stop and to preserve what I have until I can source a 1TB drive and a couple of removable, internal drive bays for my big desktop machine on the basis that properly wired in drives might have faster data rates than an external USB caddy setup does. Then try the warm oven trick.

In the meantime I will pop a spare Sata drive into the Humax and see what it makes of it.

Thanks for the input from you folk that responded, you pointed me in generally the right direction enough to be worth an evening playing.

Rans6...................................................

[Saab Dastard]

properly wired in drives might have faster data rates than an external USB caddy setup does.Yes, unless it's a USB 3 caddy (with a USB port in the PC), in which case it's probably more than fast enough to handle what a 5400 RPM HDD can muster.

[11277m]

When you have a new 1TB drive (pcpartpicker.com will show some respectable prices, around £35 ish and upwards) Macrium Reflect should manage to recognise and clone the old drive on to the new. It did for me.

As has been mentioned, if you can mount one or both 1TB drives inside your computer that should speed things up a bit.

[rans6andrew]

Mmmm, interesting. I put a new drive into the broken Humax and plugged all of the wires back in. When I switched it on it went through the normal boot up sequence, messages to the TV etc but never got to the point of showing live TV. Additionally the menu button didn't open the menus so tuning was not an option. I removed the drive and put it into the caddy and ........ nothing. It is not seen by the Linux OS at all, not even the confirmation beep you get when a blank USB stick is inserted.

It would seem that I have only two options:

1) Try to clone the drive from the other machine. Can anyone recommend a disc clone utility for Linux Mint?
2) Try to retrieve the files from the duff hard disc and pop them onto a USB stick or transfer them to the cloned drive as required.

Is there anything I might try?

Thanks,

Rans6............................

[spekesoftly]

Rans6,

After putting the new drive into the Humax and switching on, did it attempt to format the new drive as mentioned in the first part of Specaircrew's post #12 ?

[rans6andrew]

My Linux machine did not even acknowledge the presence of the new drive after it had been in the Humax which suggests that either the caddy does not see a formatted drive with no files or that the drive was not formatted by the Humax I will try the drive "internally" in the Linux machine to see if it is detected then. I obviously cannot cause the Linux machine to format a drive that is not detected when the USB caddy is plugged in. Last week I put a brand new drive into a netbook PC and installed Mint 18.3 onto it from a USB boot stick. I don't know if the machine detected the blank drive before the ISO image went across to it....

I am running out of unformatted or blank disc drives to try!

Time to get the lid off the linux box...

Rans6.......

[izod tester]

Just seen this thead. I had a similar problem some years ago. I found an app called humaxrw which enable a windows machine to access a humax formatted disk. It worked on the 9200 and 9300 machines, don't know if humax have changed their file structure since.

[Minnie Burner]

Linux will clone any HDD without special software.
I've cloned Panasonic HDDs including all the recorded programs. I'll find you the link I used, I'm not teccy so anyone could do it.
I suspect your clunky HDD is on its last legs, so you might have to clone the other drive.
The small partitions presumably carry the Humax boot and game data.

[Minnie Burner]

Sorry, I can't find a link but some Giigling might work. Here are the instructions I followed. Please exercise caution and make sue you have the correct drives identified before you proceed. Every step below is a cut and paste from my PC but I cannot be held responsible if anything goes tits up. Having said that it's worked fine for me even using Mint on a dongle in a W7 machine. I'm sure you'll be able to see around references to Panasonic and the specific HDD sizes. Caveat Emptor. Best of luck.



You will need a SATA interface to allow the Panasonic HDD and the new HDD to be connected to the Linux PC.

Now you will NOT be able to view the HDD data or copy the TV recordings onto a PC HDD to view/play on a PC

All you are doing is to make another whole HDD copy so that if your original Panasonic HDD goes dead you will have a cheaper way to replace it instead of paying £140 plus to Panasonic !!!

Now remove the Panasonic HDD and connect it to the SATA interface on the Linux PC. Also connect the new HDD to the PC.

Boot up the PC into the Ubuntu desktop.
Select 'system settings' then select 'hardware' then select 'disk utility'
This will show various items and also the 2 SATA HDDs. Click on one of the HDDs. One should show '250GB unknown format'

this should be the Panasonic HDD. To check you are looking at the correct one ensure the serial number matches the Panasonic one. Note the HDD designator ie sdb the s stands for SATA. ( hda should be the Ubuntu Hdd )
The other one may also show '250GB unknown format' but check the serial number. Note HDD designator ie sdc

Now this is the most critical part. You must be 100% certain that you know which HDD is the original Panasonic HDD and which one is the new one. Do NOT guess as you will end up with a non working PVR !!!

Now select 'Applications' then select 'accessories' then select 'terminal' Repeat this again so you end up with 2 terminal windows.

In one window type

sudo dd if=/dev/sdb of=/dev/sdc bs=32M ( it will ask you for the Ubuntu user password )

if means input file. sdb should be the Panasonic HDD <<<<< ensure this is the correct HDD
of means output file. sdc should be the new HDD
bs=32M will use a block size of 32meg.
( if you suspect your Panasonic HDD is a bit flakey then 'noerror' could be added. This means dd will not stop if it finds a bad sector )

So you are copying from the 'if=' to the 'of=' so ensure you have the HDD correct.

dd is the command to do a disk to disk copy. It will not display any information as it copies but

In the 2nd terminal window type

sudo pkill -USR1 dd ( you can repeat this as many times as you like while dd is still copying )

This will make the dd command in the other terminal window display information on how far it has copied. It may take a little while to show some info.
The dd command will take about 3-6 hours to finish the disk to disk copy!!

When finished you will have 2 HDDs that are both exact copies of each other.

[Minnie Burner]

He seems to miss out the simple fact that both HDDs must have a power connector, too.
Sorry about that.
And a 1tb disc might take 12hrs to copy.

[NutLoose]

As for

If I return it to Humax for repair will they lose all of the recorded material?

They don't tend to repair yours for you, they send a repaired one out and yours will then get cleaned and repaired to go into stock awaiting the next person

[Thirsty]

... I had a Phillips tape system with Hot Gossip on it. All I needed was the obsolete recorder to play it on.

My hearing is so badly damaged now I suppose I can't accept anything but perfect audio, which of course, rarely occurs. However, before Covid, I did visit the friend that gave me one of them and his audio was 'acceptable'...I somehow recollect in my distant past (the 'deformitive years') making sure our box was always tuned to the Kenny Everett show, purely for the 'acceptable audio' of Hot Gossip! If only my eyesight and hearing was better than my memory now. YouBoob still has some segments available, just for 'acceptable audio verification' mind you!

Oh how they writhed and twirled...

[Thirsty]

We have a couple of these machines which are two or three years old. One of them has a 1TB hard drive, the other a .5TB hard drive, both are rotating platter thingies. The units are the same model as far as can be seen.

Both are fairly full of recorded stuff.

The 1TB unit has thrown a wobbler last evening when the picture and sound suddenly stopped and then became intermittent at a slow rate, pausing for several tens of seconds between 1 or 2 seconds of play. There was the sound of the hard disk access suggesting that a recording that had been set was still happening. We left it to recover and went to bed. Today the machine goes through the waking up procedure but never completes.............. There are some of the expected screen messages showing the waking up process and it gets to the second part of what it should do from memory and then... nothing.

Some questions:

If I return it to Humax for repair will they lose all of the recorded material?

If I remove the drive from the faulty machine might I be able to read the files off it with anything I have to hand? I have a disk caddy to USB unit which can power up a disk drive and allow access to the files IF the format is common to either a Win8 PC or my Linux Mint machines.

Is there any point in swapping the drive from the bad unit to the good unit to see what happens? As the drives are different sizes I wonder if anything else in the machines is different to allow the OS to load, bios settings not on the disk could cause both machines to end up broken .....

Anyone?

Rans6....................................................... ..............Sounds like you have physical damage. Running a spinning drive with audible internal loose elements is just inviting further damage. The ONLY way to ensure no further data loss is to send it off for clean room data recovery. I have done this a number of times where customers have valued their data as irrecoverable. Yes they have paid the five figure price for the privilege, but they did get their data back as the drive is carefully disassembled in ultra-clean room conditions, cleaned, reassembled and the data copied onto a new drive using know working electronics. Don't do this at home unless you just want the drive magnets and platters to play with, and don't mind losing all data.

In your case, the shows will eventually come around again, hopefully, so somebody else has a copy. It is not like they are NASA deep space recordings or BBC shows and have been lost to mankind forever. Humax may replace the drives, but they will not do data recovery for you, at least not for free.

Doing a direct copy to another drive may get most of the data off your old drive. Setting to drive copy software to ignore bad sectors will mean that files that have bad areas will be corrupt as chunks will be missing on the copies, and unless you have a copy of what sectors map to what files, you might not know which files have not been fully preserved. If your stars are aligned, the bad sectors may be areas that do not currently have any valid data pointing to them, and all your data files remain intact on the new drive. If so, go buy a lottery ticket and enjoy your new found good karma.

The other consideration is while you are copying disk-to-disk instead of file-to-file, all the bad areas (not just the ones flagged as in use) are re-tried a few times, and the drive is still spinning while this extended data transfer is in progress. If you truly have catastrophic drive damage, the longer your drive is spinning, the greater your final loss is going to be. Conversely, if your drive is fairly full and fragmented, file-to-file copy is going to involve a lot more head movement across the faulty platters, and the amount of devastation will be greater.

If your drive is degrading and has ever expanding bad areas, the Humax software (probably some form of Linux) may be mapping them out of service and saving your data to known good areas. In this case, take it as a timely warning and replace the drive and copy over your data before it fails altogether. Most drive failures give some warning - if you are looking for them. In you case, the warnings are quite clear. Do not procrastinate.

1Tb drives are quite cheap these days. Worth trying, if only just for the experience and awareness that backups are a necessary part of computing these days. Like the Vatican Bank motto: Jesus saves, so should you!

If you just want to isolate the problem, swapping a known working drive into the suspect box sounds like a easy task to confirm the electronics are not faulty and you hard drive is on the way out. Spinning hard drives have been carefully designed over decades of experience to survive the warranty period, and often not much more. The manufacture date will be on the drive near the serial number. If it is still under warranty, you will get a blank hard drive (often reconditioned and not new), and an offer of data recovery on your old one, AT YOUR OWN EXPENSE, if the manufacturer comes to the party.

Please keep us informed of what you eventually end up doing.

[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......

[Stu666]

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.

[The late XV105]

An interesting thread.

I have a Humax Fox T2 HDD recorder and only the other day was wondering if I will be able to swap the disc when it eventually fails. The reason for doing this is that it is the only HD PVR that I know where it is straightforward to move HD recordings to my laptop for watching when travelling long haul (not that I am doing a lot of that at the moment!). The DRM on all others prevents this, tying recordings to the original Humax motherboard. To learn how to do this, search for Foxy on the hummy.tv website already mentioned.

[rans6andrew]

Errm, until the machine completes it's boot up you cannot access the menu to see if there is a format option!

XV105 - you might want to clone your existing drive before it gives any issues, it is an uphill struggle once the drive gets dodgy.

Rans6...................

[The late XV105]

XV105 - you might want to clone your existing drive before it gives any issues, it is an uphill struggle once the drive gets dodgy.

I will indeed - likely to a spare 1TB SSD that I have (like you commented, to reduce noise) - and if that doesn't work, to a spare 2TB HDD that I also have.
The only challenge for the moment is that I am on secondment living in Sri Lanka and my T2 is boxed up in the spare room back in the UK!

[kenparry]

Rans6:

Another very useful forum is hummy.tv, where there is much expertise on most (all?) Humax products. I have a Humax HDR-FOX T2 and have been there successfully for help on a couple of problems, including HDD replacement.

Good luck!

KP

[Stu666]

Errm, until the machine completes it's boot up you cannot access the menu to see if there is a format option!.

Take the duff HDD out then and replace it. The machine should still boot even without a HDD connected. If it still doesn't boot after that, sounds like you have something else going on.

[rans6andrew]

I finally found the time to have another play and find the following:

I used Clonezilla to create a copy of the 500GB drive from the good machine. I tried it in the working machine and it made it work normally. Good.

I put the copied drive into the 1TB faulty machine and it "started" but never completed booting up, resetting and re-starting at about 5 min intervals.

I then put the copied drive into the good machine which booted up and then behaved like a new machine by updating the OS and re-tuning all of the programme channels. It then worked normally. All of our recorded programmes were apparently preserved intact, I only watched a few minutes of one to check but everything seemd OK.

Some drives are not 100% compatible with the disk caddy! Something I suspected from before.

Clearly the faulty 1TB machine does something to a good 500GB drive when I is installed which makes it obvious to the good 500GB machine when installed there, I don't know what.

The 1TB machine does not initialise a blank 500GB drive, again I don't know if it would do to with a 1TB drive but I am going to find out soon.

I am not in a position to see if the good 500GB machine does anything useful with a blank 500GB drive.

A close inspection of the innards of both machines shows that both have the same iteration of the same circuit board. The circuit boards have no obvious option links or switches but they may have information programmed in which stops them from working with the wrong size HDD.

The disk partitions are similar between the 500GB and 1TB drives, the two smaller ones are the same sizes, only the large video storage space is changed.

I have got no further with warming the faulty 1TB drive to see if the data can be cloned. Until the 1TB SSD arrives I have nowhere big enough to clone it to.

I have a work around which takes the disk caddy out of the cloning process.

Rans6.....

[rans6andrew]

I revisited hummy.tv and went a bit further in and now I understand. Each machine encrypts the files using its MAC address as the encryption key. No wonder one machine didn't work with the HDD from another. I di try a blank drive in one machine but may not have left it for long enough for it to rebuild its OS from a www download..........

Rans6..........................

[rans6andrew]

After swapping hard drives back and forth the box reloaded its OS and then re-tuned the channels and......... everything seemed OK. Since then we have found one channel, Drama on freeview 20 has a poor signal showing as a blocky picture and dropping out regularly. I swapped back to an old freeview box last evening and it shows no issues with the Drama channel (or any other that I tried). I don't understand.

Rans6.....................................

[rans6andrew]

I do understand now. While testing the old freeview box didn't show any issues because I was only playing with its remote controller during the swap and test. The freeview recorder plays up on Drama only when I sit in my chair with a laptop computer in use on my lap. If one thing doesn't cause problems something else will.

Rans6...........

[rans6andrew]

Sorry it has been a while but moving house took priority....

I finally got an insulated and heated box ready to accept the poorly hard drive and attempted to read it. As expected it failed to access any data when at room temperature but as it was gently heated it started to deliver stuff, initially just the partitions became detectable and then a while later, as it warmed a bit further, some of the directories in a one of the partitions became accessible. Further warming produced no further file accesses and eventually I stopped the warming when the drive was heated beyond its allowed working range. One for the bin.

Back with the machine, I installed a 1GB SSD and plugged it in. Again it didn't attempt to format the drive or do anything other than keep re-booting and failing to start on a cyclic basis, every 7 or 8 minutes. I then went on the WWW and searched for Humax Freeview recorder repairs. This led me to the website of a company in Belfast where I noticed that they were able to do hard disk replacements somewhat cheaper than I have seen rotating disk drives on sale. With nothing to lose I rang them to ask if they could install an SSD and how much that would be. They could not, they don't supply SSDs. I asked if they could fit an SSD if I supplied one and was asked how I could be sure that that is where the problem lies so I then explained where I had got to in fault finding. They then told me that all I need to do is to initialise the SSD in the machine and to put it into maintenance mode, select factory reset and the rest will sort itself out. I then asked how to invoke maintenance mode and was given the instructions to do it. Top marks to them. Apparently to get maintenance mode you remove power from the unit, plug it back in, hold the down arrow on either the front panel or remote controller and wait for the machine to wake up. Keep holding the down key for a few seconds and a message offering Maintenance mode will pop up. At this point you release the down key, press the on-off button once and wait. Just when you think nothing is going to happen it goes to maintenance mode and you can select factory reset - removing all recordings and it sorts itself out from there. After a few minutes it restarts and appears to be just as it was when it was bought brand new. All up and running with the SSD now, I have it doing a recording while we watch the other side, so far so good........

Meanwhile, I have succeeded in making a clone of the HDD in our other machine, the 0.5TB one, onto another 0.5TB HDD. It works when fitted to the machine it was cloned from. This was done using Clonezilla, freeby for Linux Mint computers. On my Mint desktop machine I can see all of the files and apparently copy them although I understand that they won't play if I copy them to another machine due to machine serial number based encryption but while I have both machines I can still watch them. While looking about in the cloned drive I noticed that all of the partitions on the 0.5TB drive are the same as the 1TB drive except the large one where the video files are stored. The next thing I want to do is to fit a 1TB SSD in the 0.5TB machine.

There seems to be two ways I might do this using the resources I have.

One method might be to clone the 0.5TB drive onto the 1TB SSD thus making a 0.5TB SSD and then try to move the partitions around using my Mint machine to give the larger capacity to the one where the video files are stored. The other way might be to use the freeview machine to initialise the 1TB SSD and then to copy the files from the 0.5TB HDD to the 1TB SSD, again using the Mint machine. I can't figure out which method stands the best chance of success because I don't know whether I can move partitions on a part full drive without disturbing the data already saved to it. Anybody?

Thanks,

Rans6..............................

[netstruggler]

One method might be to clone the 0.5TB drive onto the 1TB SSD thus making a 0.5TB SSD and then try to move the partitions around using my Mint machine to give the larger capacity to the one where the video files are stored. The other way might be to use the freeview machine to initialise the 1TB SSD and then to copy the files from the 0.5TB HDD to the 1TB SSD, again using the Mint machine. I can't figure out which method stands the best chance of success because I don't know whether I can move partitions on a part full drive without disturbing the data already saved to it. Anybody?


Should be possible. google 'gparted extend partition'. gparted will be available on your Mint system I think.