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AngusA – 18 minutes ago »
Just another datapoint on the hard drive issue. My HDR-1000s suddenly lost all recordings and ability to record/pause TV in mid October. That situation remained the same for around 4 weeks until suddenly last week, all recordings reappeared as did the record/pause capability. I noticed that for the entire period the box was faulty, the On Demand channels images disappeared even though on demand still worked okay. When the recordings reappeared, so did the On Demand images and I feel this is not coincidental. My gut feeling (as an electronic engineer) is that the issue I describe is firmware and not hardware related. Were it to be hardware, I cannot see why the box would recover nor why the On Demand images would re-appear at the same time as the recordings.
This also happened on some units returned to Humax under warranty some time after they were sent back. I wouldn’t expect it to stay fixed for very long.
We already know that the earlier production boxes using the same firmware aren’t prone to this issue.
Well it’s a strange one for sure and I’m under no illusion that my troubles are over! It’s of course very significant if earlier hardware is fault-free while running the same firmware. Component tolerances are certainly a possibility but I would have expected a more permanent failure in that case and certainly not a recovery after several weeks. It may be a combination of less than robust firmware running on hardware with one or more marginal components. Perhaps there is a perfect storm when the firmware reaches a particular state.
One thing I know is that it is very painful to debug firmware retrospectively and trying to find the particular combination of circumstances that leads to reported failures on just some units. I can quite see why a manufacturer prefers to replace units (at some cost to the consumer) rather than try and find the errant code.
No doubt my box will have failed next time I turn it on!
AngusA – 13 minutes ago »
Well it’s a strange one for sure and I’m under no illusion that my troubles are over! It’s of course very significant if earlier hardware is fault-free while running the same firmware. Component tolerances are certainly a possibility but I would have expected a more permanent failure in that case and certainly not a recovery after several weeks. It may be a combination of less than robust firmware running on hardware with one or more marginal components. Perhaps there is a perfect storm when the firmware reaches a particular state.
One thing I know is that it is very painful to debug firmware retrospectively and trying to find the particular combination of circumstances that leads to reported failures on just some units. I can quite see why a manufacturer prefers to replace units (at some cost to the consumer) rather than try and find the errant code.
No doubt my box will have failed next time I turn it on!
We think though it’s not definite, it’s a resistor on the motherboard that goes out of spec. This stems from a comment made to a member here by Humax support. Before this the general consensus was it was likely to be a blown capacitor though no signs of bulging were ever spotted.
The Foxsat-HD (but not the Foxsat-HDR) used the notorious Capxon capacitors in the power supply. Fortunately a simple and cheap repair.
It’s possible of course and they may have changed to say a 5% tolerance resistor from a 1% on earlier hardware. That still leaves the question why it suddenly fails and more importantly, why it recovers after a prolonged period of time? In my experience, resistors rarely go out of spec but of course will do when heated. That would be an explanation but switching the box off to cool would resolve and this does not work I understand. Another possibility could be a revised layout of the box internals in later versions such that a heat source is now closer to a heat sensitive component but again, I would expect the behaviour to be more repeatable and predictable. I can’t get away from there being at least some connection to the firmware as the root of the fault but I am quite open minded to the possibility there’s a hardware connection too.
“That still leaves the question why it suddenly fails and more importantly, why it recovers after a prolonged period of time? “…. as an “electronics engineer” I’m surprised that you have never experience a dry solder joint or a simple intermittent bad connection!!!
Well of course I have had plenty experience of both of those and did not discount a change in manufacturing process as a possible cause.
I’m just trying to suggest my take on this from a single unit’s evidence. If we are in the business of speculation, I can suggest plenty of other possible causes….
From reading many posts on this issue I note that older units (late 2012 and 2013) do not have the issue.
This suggests to me that the component concerned, believed to be a resistor, either was changed (unlikely, I think) or failed to conform to specification (more likely, I think).
My less than 3 year old Freesat hdr1000S suddenly showed that recordings were not available and Disk Drive needed formatting press OK to start formatting. Tried power down and restart but same problem. Tried again 12 hours later and the stored recording recordings shown as available and unit appears to function correctly??
please provide details of components that have been identified as suspect in similar earlier posts.
Regards
Roybert
It is said to be a resistor but which one has not been disclosed.
nickkr – 1 week ago »
“That still leaves the question why it suddenly fails and more importantly, why it recovers after a prolonged period of time? “…. as an “electronics engineer” I’m surprised that you have never experience a dry solder joint or a simple intermittent bad connection!!!
I think that this is the most likely cause of the problem. I am a repairer of a great many Topfield PVRs, and I have often been sent faulty ones which magically fix themselves after a few weeks of being unpowered. I’m confident that this is down to lead-free solder which cracks due to heat, then the connection grows back over a period of time. It fails again quite soon of course. Unfortunately, the fault is usually under a BGA chip, so it cannot be fixed with a soldering iron. There are a great many videos on Youtube of various ‘fixes’ for this type of fault, often on PC graphics cards.
If you look at the fan on your Humax, you’re unlikely to see any sign of dust, indicating that it rarely, if ever runs. The main processor runs so hot that you would get a burn off the heatsink, so it may be this chip that is the problem, or one of the surrounding ones. If Humax reduced the threshold temperature for the fan, I think the problem would not occur; perhaps that is what they did in later versions?
grahamlthompson – 5 months ago »
AngusA – 18 minutes ago »
Just another datapoint on the hard drive issue. My HDR-1000s suddenly lost all recordings and ability to record/pause TV in mid October. That situation remained the same for around 4 weeks until suddenly last week, all recordings reappeared as did the record/pause capability. I noticed that for the entire period the box was faulty, the On Demand channels images disappeared even though on demand still worked okay. When the recordings reappeared, so did the On Demand images and I feel this is not coincidental. My gut feeling (as an electronic engineer) is that the issue I describe is firmware and not hardware related. Were it to be hardware, I cannot see why the box would recover nor why the On Demand images would re-appear at the same time as the recordings.
This also happened on some units returned to Humax under warranty some time after they were sent back. I wouldn’t expect it to stay fixed for very long.
We already know that the earlier production boxes using the same firmware aren’t prone to this issue.
My mainboard is from 2012 it has the year stamped on it, recordings failed to be recognised, magically corrected itself again after about 4 months and failed again some 6 months later.
Recent house move it has not been powered up for around 8 months, just tried it today, still no hard disk recognised.
Will be trying the capacitor change and if that works will be selling it forthwith.
If I ever return to ‘Freesat’ will utilise a cheaper, better and more reliable Enigma 2 based linux receiver instead.
Many Thanks to all the contributors on here. My DTR1010 died a week ago. It had been poorly for while with the operation freezing occasionally. This needed a Power Off then on again to fix it. Eventually nothing would get it back working, just a series of short buzzes from the drive, so I tried some of the tips on this Forum to find the problem. I finally decided it was either the SATA driver or the actual Seagate HDD at fault. When I opened the HDD I found the Read/Write head 1/3 across the disk – not parked correctly! Armed with what seemed a good clue, I bought a cheap replacement from ebay for £10, thinking it must be worth a tenner to try it. Success! Re-installed everything and ran the Maintenance option, selected a Software reset and after a very long wait, everything works again as normal. My next problem is – do I try to recover the recordings from the original HDD. Buy another cheapie Seagate drive and swap the actual disk to a working drive – this could be a step too far for my ‘clean study’ environment, but I am tempted ………
SteveZ – 1 hour ago »
Buy another cheapie Seagate drive and swap the actual disk to a working drive
I would say that unless you know exactly what you are doing then the chances of that working are very low.
Hi Martin – yes I agree, but I have ordered a dual SATA docking station and another HDD to see if I can clone the old drive. If it will run it should work, failing that I’ll give the disk swap a go – nothing to lose really and it is interesting work.
I have an HDR1010, bought in 2013. I posted before (Sun 3 Apr 2016 0:24:34 #185). #185 tells of how I managed to recover all our recordings that appeared to have disappeared. I was not completely sure what the magic trick was. I had tried several from this forum. Persistence and patience (and hope?) seemed to be the main factors.
A similar event occurred in April 2019. I looked up #185 to remind myself of what I did then. I consulted Humax Support (as I expected things would have moved on in the intervening 3 years!). They advised me to reset the system.
I did this but it seemed to have made no difference. I replied saying the HDR was still showing “less than 1%”, no recordings and “record was not working”. They then suggested that the only thing left was to reformat the hard drive. I didn’t want to do that! Eventually I wrote back to Humax Support saying:
I was able to retrieve my recordings 3 years ago and I tend to be quite stubborn. On this occasion I disconnected the device and connected it to another TV with a simple HDMI cable. It protested about the lack of inputs, but immediately told me that our recordings were back. I returned it to its original TV, made up all the connections and it has been working fine for the last few days. Maybe your “reset to factory settings” played some part in its recovery, albeit very delayed? What do you think?
They thought: “The problem you are having may be down to possible failing components inside the device which may ultimately fail.”
We have just had this problem again. I tried earlier solutions without success. The recorded files were said to be in an unreadable format; sometimes the HDR reported 33% and sometimes less that 1%; sometimes the recorded programmes were listed (but unreadable), sometimes it reported no recordings. On one occasion I was able to start playing a recording, but I was then presented with the “no recordings” screen. I did try connecting the Freesat App. I also tried giving the HDR vents a few blasts with a pressurised air “duster”. (I have seen another post about there being a poor heatsink on a CPU. If the problem is triggered by overheating it might just take time for things to reset).
The latest is that we are back to normal. We have reinstated our recording schedules and can view all our old recordings. Until the next time…
Richer Sounds tell me that hard drives have limited life expectancy, so maybe we’ve done well to have one for nearly 6 years. But it seems to me that the fault is not really with the hard drive itself as this would not be so intermittent and reversible.
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