Seconded.

Its no good to you now, but if a similar situation arose in the future there could be a way out.

Install the custom firmware and decrypt your recordings, copy them to an external HDD, or PC. That way you will be able to transfer them back if required. As a bonus they will play on your PC too.

If ever you wanted to fit a larger HDD in you HDR (I don’t know what size disk you currently have) copying the existing recordings to another HDD then back to the new drive could be done easier. Although in this case, as the machine is the same one as the recordings were made, technically there wouldn’t be the need to decrypt first.

For more info on the custom firmware you could take a look over at Hummy.tv here: http://hummy.tv/forum/index.php

You never know. I am not a fan of the original Seagate 1TB HDD fitted to these models.

I recently purchased a brand new 1TB HDR, within a couple of weeks the HDD was showing increasing reallocated sectors. Not had much luck with Seagates in my PC over the years either. I am sure that there must be some happy Seagate customers out there….

Sorry that won’t work. The key used to decrypt the recordings, both SD and HD, is stored in hardware and is unique to the box. The SD recordings are decrypted while being transferred, but using the key that was used to encrypt them in the first place. Obviously, the key you now have is not the same as the one you had when the recordings were made. You have already proven that it won’t work otherwise you wouldn’t be here asking!

HTH.

Purely an academic question, but does anybody know whether the encryption hardware ID is the MAC address, in which case it could be spoofed, or a CPU ID such as the raspberry pi which they use to licence mpeg2? If it’s the MAC address and it can be spoofed then there’s little hope, possible maybe to recover the files, if it’s the CPU ID then I’m assuming there’s no hope to recover/decrypt

I guess Humax repairs shouldn’t format the hard drive, before returning, just in case there’s personal stuff, photos etc. on it.

More reason, then, to install the excellent custom firmware, I have auto decrypt running, as do most people here I guess (thanks to those involved).

Back to Wallace’s post, manufacturers used to give 3-5 years warranty on a drive (most of my older ones have 5). This seems to be 1-2 years now, so we can all see where it’s going. I’ve a Seagate 32MB drive (with its own 8bit card) that still powered up a year ago, but I’ve plenty of IBM drives over the years that’ve failed. Sometimes it’s a known problem and a firmware update is needed. Humax do seem to have had more then their fair share of problms with the 1TB model though.

I’ve had good experience with Samsung green power and who ever it is that has intellipower (WD) where the spin speed is variable, but around 5900rpm. Ironically I’ve also got an Hitachi Deskstar 5K3000 2TB green at the moment in my HdrFoxT2 which has been perfect and Hitachi storage took over IBM, which just goes to show that there’s no clear winner as far as Hard Drives go. I’d never buy a pvr drive as it makes no sense to me, rather a 4500 or 5400rpm or some form of intellipower with proper error correction.

Back to LaurieR, your old recordings are now duff, sorry, but put the custom firmware on the box and enter a new world.