JHeaton – 1 day ago  » 

So – I’ve ordered a SATA to USB cable, the nice people at Amazon should be delivering it on Tuesday. I’ve also extracted the HDD from the dead box and put it safely. Hopefully once I connect up to my laptop, I’ll be able to upload the programmes via either HumaxRW or Hummyreadfiles (which would be better for my purpose)

Humaxrw will work; I am not sure about Hummyreadfiles as there are small difference between the file system for the 9200 and the 9150/9300 and I don’t know whether Hummyreadfiles was updated to support both.

And once I get the files onto the laptop, how do I then watch them back?

Try VLC as a starting point.

bobbicat – 1 hour ago  » 

I’d be very interested in details on accessing, copying or transferring files from the 9150t

Basically you need a way of connecting the hard drive to a PC (either a USB to SATA adapter or USB enclosure for a 3.5″ SATA drive) and the humaxrw software which can be downloaded from this forum Link to Humaxrw

also information on removing the internal hard drive from the same.

I have never taken a 9150 to bits but basically unplug the electrical supply, remove the lid (a few screws at the back), disconnect the power and data cable from the hard drive and wither take the rive out of the caddy or remove the caddy complete with hard drive.

bobbicat – 1 hour ago  » 

thanks for that information, Martin

would it be possible or practical to transfer the files on the 9150t hard drive across to the FVP4000t internal drive via a SATA to USB cable?

You have to do it via a PC (using a SATA to USB converter or if it is a desktop using a spare SATA port) as the file system on the 9150 is proprietary and needs special software to read it.

bobbicat – 1 hour ago  » 

my PC operating system is Linux – is this needed software windows only?

A Linux version was available but I am not sure where to find a copy now.

bobbicat – 6 minutes ago  » 

I found something – humaxrw-1.14.tgz – but running the humaxrw program it contains reported no humax disk found.

What command line options did you use?

I checked the disk with a good partition editor [gparted] – it found the disk but reported it had an unrecognized format.

As I keep trying to tell you the file system is proprietary to Humax and not recognised by Unix/Linux tools nor Windows.

I think the program I found is a number of years old and possibly not compatible with more up to date software and equipment, also it might possibly also have unmet dependencies.

I would be very surprised if that was the case.

bobbicat – 6 minutes ago  » 

if i try to use command line options i get humaxrw command not recognized

Use the command line. My guess would be you have placed the executable in a directory that is not in the path. Try giving the full path to the executable or using cd to change to the directory where you have placed it and trying

./humaxrw 2: -l

If that doesn’t work try changing the 2: until it finds the drive (1:, 3:, 4: etc) (second argument is a lower case L).

Thanks again, Martin. You pointed me in the right direction and I was able to get a result.

Please excuse this long and rambling post.

I’m writing this out fully so that if another Linux user comes along this might be of use to them.

All of this assumes the drive and its folders are undamaged. This post does not cover recovery or repair options.

I downloaded humaxrw-1.14.tgz to my /Home folder from MyHumaxBlog found on the page ‘9200T Downloads’ dated Mar19th2015 – it was added in 2011 but works okay on a 64bit Ubuntu operating system.

I extracted it into my /Home folder and worked with the executable ‘humaxrw’ from there.

In Ubuntu Linux a sata drive is defined in this form, /dev/sdX where X is the drive specified as X= a, b, c, d etc [Letters are used rather than numbers]

The old form /dev/hdX [used in the readme] changed to /dev/sdX when sata drives came along.

I ran ‘sudo blkid’ in the terminal with the Humax drive connected and identified it as /dev/sdd.

Not surprising as I already have three drives connected and they show up as /dev/sda, /dev/sdb, and /dev/sdc.

I had to use sudo with the commands to make them work. [sudo is superuser – a bit like admin in windows]

So the list command looked like this:

That worked. I got a list of the recordings on the Humax disk.

You will need to check the drive letter for the Humax disk on your equipment, it might not be /dev/sdd.

I was able to go on to successfully back up from the Humax drive to my /Home folder.

To achieve this I entered the following in the terminal:

The backup only took a few minutes. Really pleasing as I was dreading that it might take hours. The backed up files appeared in my /Home directory.

The .ts files will run with no problem through VLC media player on my PC.

I have copied the files onto a spare ext4 formatted hard drive and intend to find out if my FVP4000t can see them.

If it cannot I’ll reformat to ext3 and try again.

There is a comprehensive description in the readme, which is however slightly out of date as far as sata drives are concerned. However this does not affect the performance of the program ‘humaxrw’.