Humax freesat box not recording

flopsy1973

Hi
We have a freesat box that has lost all its recordings and will not recognise the hard drive. It has come up on screen to format hard drive but nothing happens when i press ok. I have read lots of forums about problems with these and the possibility the recordings may come back by itself.
Is there anything i can do or try to test if the hard drive is ok and can these be replaced

many thanks

buglawton

Have you disconnected the power supply, waited a few minutes and then reconnected it? I do this when my PVR box says need to format and the recordings come back.

almillar

Good suggestion by bugslawton, and if that doesn't work, I'd be very worried that the hard drive has failed/is failing to be honest. After trying that, you might want to try a factory reset just in case, but you'll lose your recordings. If you're worried about that, you might be able to get the drive out, connect it to a computer, and see if anything can be recovered. You could even clone the drive onto a new (bigger?) drive as an upgrade. Depends on the model, there could be software for it.

If you're not traumatised by the loss of its contents, the good news is that any PVR will just contain a standard desktop/laptop hard drive. Take it apart to find out, or tell us what model it is. Could be a good opportunity to upgrade it to a bigger drive if you're happy with it but the disk is nearly full.

psychic_teabag

I have an old freeview humax box. The disk uses a proprietry format, but there is software available to extract files and copy to pc. (I use linux, but also available for windows.) I think it can also try to recover recordings from a corrupt disk, but I've never had to do that. I don't know that freesat uses the same format.

My old PVR1900T uses PATA, and is a bit fussy about the disk it uses. (Has to spin up within in a certain time.) You'd probably have trouble even getting a PATA replacement these days. Some people reported success using SATA and an inline SATA/PATA convertor, but I didn't try that. Of course, if your freesat box is newer, it will be SATA anyway.

flopsy1973

Did a restore factory default and no luck. on setting up the channels afterwards there was no signal on tuner 2 is this normal or is this another issue

pamsdish

I have a Humax freesat, no expert by any stretch but if no signal on have you had your dish checked, I lost mine a couple of years ago and it was a fault in dish, transponder or something. about £25 to repair.

pamsdish

psychic_teabag wrote: »

I have an old freeview humax box. The disk uses a proprietry format, but there is software available to extract files and copy to pc. (I use linux, but also available for windows.) I think it can also try to recover recordings from a corrupt disk, but I've never had to do that. I don't know that freesat uses the same format.

Can you explain that very simply please, I have loads on my humax that I would like on my portable hard drive to play in another room.

psychic_teabag

pamsdish wrote: »

Can you explain that very simply please, I have loads on my humax that I would like on my portable hard drive to play in another room.

What is the exact model of humax you have ? If it's still working correctly, some models have a USB port on the front, and you can simply insert a USB drive and copy the media across. eg see https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TKy74GFkBpI Older freeview boxes also had usb slave sockets and allowed humax 'elinker' software to retrieve recordings.

But for OP, the humax itself can't see the recordings, so you need to take the disk out and see if a PC can find anything on it. So either put the disk into a spare drive bay on the PC, or using a USB to ATA bridge gadget (I've had one for ages)

For freeview PVR9200T, there's free software called "humaxrw" which can decode the proprietry file format - google for that and you should find instructions.

It seems that the FoxSat model uses a different format - ext2 or ext3, which is a linux standard filesystem (perhaps the humax is itself running linux ?) Eg see http://www.360panoramas.co.uk/humax/

flopsy1973

It's a HDR 1000S iv read that maybe you would not get signal on tuner 2 until it is used or recording is that right?

debitcardmayhem

Have you got two leads?

pamsdish

I can only see Humax foxsat hdr it is 5 years old about now. psychic teabag, I have put an empty 16 g usb stick in the front but not formatted correctly, it`s fat 32, tried to look at my hard drive properties but can`t see what format and a little nervous about plugging it in to humax as I don`t want to lose anything off there.