Humax hard disk freeview box
Thread Starter
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..............................
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..............................
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?
