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Nigel_HD – 1 hour ago »
So just to be sure (and save me searching the forum) is there any way to recover the encrypted files on the old HDD ?
I am pretty sure there is not. The encryption requirement comes from the broadcasters.
OK. So looking forward I have three options.
1 Repair the HDR-1000S.
2 Buy a new HDR-1100S.
3 Buy a new HB-1100S and use an external HDD.
In a few words, what are the pros and cons of options 2 vs. 3 ?
2. Has built-in Wi-Fi. Same Firmware as HDR-1000S. No SCART connection.
3. Only single tuner. Need to add cost of chosen disk size plus caddy. Recommended to use AV/CE spec drive. If power consumption within USB limits it is possible to use unpowered caddy (which I do) It is nice not having to separately power down an unpowered caddy.
Has anyone used ‘digirepairs.co.uk’ … “Digi Repairs UK Ltd is happy to announce that we are now the UK and Ireland specialist repair centre for all Humax Freeview, Freesat and Youview products.”
It’s either them or Humax themselves.
No, but I believe the Humax offer includes delivery in both directions.
Nigel_HD – 20 hours ago »
Oh dear. So just to be sure (and save me searching the forum) is there any way to recover the encrypted files on the old HDD ? If not, it seems to me a very poor system. I made the recordings for my own personal use — but they are now ‘locked’. It’s not as if they are commercial ‘ripped’ DVDs ! Sorry if this is an old chestnut.
The reason that your posts suggests is NOT the reason that broadcast recordings are encrypted.
The encryption is aimed at reigning in personal misuse of TV broadcasts.
The reason that broadcast recordings are encrypted is to help limit personal use to that intended by the broadcasters so that the impact on sales of DVDs and other media formats is reduced.
The thinking behind it is that is someone can easily build a library of recordings they are less likely to purchase DVDs and the like.
If there were no effort to reduce the impact to personal users then this also means that that the broadcasters potentially would have to pay more for the rights to broadcast. Due to cash constraints this in turn would adversely impact the quality of the programmes that are broadcast.
UPDATE … Lazarus rules ?
So I had resigned myself to a dead Humax and all recordings lost. Because removing the unit from my TV/audio cabinet is not a 5 minute job, I put it on my to-do-list and have been running a ‘workaround’ by connecting a separate HDD to my Panasonic twin-tuner plasma TV. Not particularly elegant, but it works.
Anyway, this evening, we sat down to watch our usual Tuesday evening programmes, and something made me hit the record button on the EPG. It seemed to accept the command. Strange. I then looked at the list of recordings – which last week was empty – only to find they are all there ! I had done nothing since the earlier power-downs (for 3+ days) and the factory reset. I am so glad I had not sent the unit off for repair (and inevitable loss of access my encrypted stored data).
Questions:
1 Is this ‘recovery’ (after over a week) something other users have experienced ?
2 Is there anything I should do to prevent a recurrence ?
3 I did read that SD recordings CAN be copied off the HDD and played independently of the Humax box because they are not encrypted. Is this correct ?
4 Is there any way to ‘back-up’ my existing recordings to preserve them in the event of future problems ?
Thanks to all for your previous advice. Please keep it coming.
1 Yes – Humax experienced same on units returned for repair
2 Not afaik other than possibly unpairing the remote schedule app if paired.
3 No recordings can be exported from the G2 boxes
4 Not afaik
Hi Nigel, welcome to the ‘Dead Humax HDR-1000 hard drive Society’.
I joined this popular club last year and, like many others, went through all the same options/questions as yourself and received on this forum similar helpful advice as you have.
I didn’t exchange the unit right away as I was hanging on to my 1Tb of unaccessible recordings but finally, after a suitable period of mourning, bit the bullet and gave Humax my £55 and a nice new/refurbed HDR-1100S arrived the other day. I was on here searching for DLNA help and saw a familiar thread title re. lost recordings.
As far as I know Humax stopped repairing this hard drive ‘known issue’ as the repairs often failed at a later date.
In desperation I turned my unit off for weeks but it never recovered so you were one of the lucky ones.
I contacted Humax early December to do the exchange but they only swap units with the same hard drive size and mine was 1Tb and they had none of this size in their refurb stock so I had to wait. I called back weekly and then asked if they could send me a 500Gb unit on loan for the festive season but ‘computer said no’. They then said they would call me when a 1Tb unit was in stock, but they didn’t. I called on 4th Jan and they said they had plenty so I paid the £55 and now have an HDR-1100S which is working fine so far.
It is an improvement as being wireless I can get rid of the ethernet cable to the router. The remote control is slightly different which takes a bit of getting used to.
The courier brings the new refurb unit and takes away your old box in exchange. As well as a like-for-like hard drive size swap I think it also has to be the same colour as well.
If it is possible that your unit may or may not die in the near future you might want to consider watching all the stored programs and then doing a £55 exchange before you get too far out of the warranty. If you get an understanding engineer on the helpdesk they may agree to an exchange before the unit fails again if you explain what happened. The refurb units only come with 6 monhs warranty I think. The original units had a 2 year warranty but I feel Humax are being pretty generous with their exchange policy (they can date the unit from it’s serial number so you can discuss this with them) as mine was probably 2.5 years old and there was no issue.
Hope your unit goes on for years but thought I would let you know my experience as this forum has been so helpful to me.
As the Humax guru Graham has mentioned there is a suspicion that the Humax app may have been the culprit as it was the first question the engineers asked me. My old unit had the app configured and the hard drive used to crank up all the time every few minutes when the box was off. I deleted the app but, unbeknown to me, it remained on the box and the drive continued to fire up all the time and this constant stop/start may have caused early drive failures although I thought it was something on the control board. Whatever the cause it might be best for reliability, certainly on the 1000 model, to turn off the app as my new box just sits quietly and the drive doesn’t constantly start up when the unit is off. Good luck anyway.
Andrew — thanks for this most detailed and informative post. It’s good (?) to know I’m not the only member of this club. If other manufacturers – like Apple – treated ‘dead hard drives’ with such lack of interest, there would be an outcry. Sadly, Humax seem to have the UK Freesat market pretty much tied up, so looking for alternatives is a no-go. I’ll cross my fingers.
Incidentally, I have never run the Freesat or Humax app, so that is not responsible for my issue.
Yes I agree, Humax seem to have dodged a bullet on this as I am certain this is a known issue with these models and suspect they have repaired and replaced hundreds if not thousands of these models.
What concerns me also is where they are getting all these refurbished 1100S’s from!
AndrewB – 7 hours ago »
As far as I know Humax stopped repairing this hard drive ‘known issue’ as the repairs often failed at a later date.
That is incorrect.
AndrewB – 7 hours ago »
Yes I agree, Humax seem to have dodged a bullet on this as I am certain this is a known issue with these models and suspect they have repaired and replaced hundreds if not thousands of these models.
What concerns me also is where they are getting all these refurbished 1100S’s from!
That is also incorrect.
Well I beg to disagree as you yourself stated in 2016 “It is a hardware issue affecting a small number of units” https://myhumax.org/forum/topic/not-recording-no-hard-drive-hdr-1000s500gb/page/2#post-52816
A quick Googling Humax HDR-1000 lost recordings or hard drive failure brings up many threads on several forums of people complaining of this fault for years and every time a new thread is opened many people respond that they have had the same fault as well, but OK perhaps my prediction of possibly ‘thousands’ of failures may be too high.
It has been widely reported that it was a combination of a possible issue with the Humax app and a failing resistor on the motherboard HDD control circuitry.
In 2015 these failures were being repaired for £26 by Humax but in 2017 they stopped repairing and started exchanging failed units with HDR-1100S (and not with refurbished HDR-1000S units).
When recently I was trying to get Humax to repair my unit a Humax engineer told me they used to ship the units for repair somewhere in Eastern Europe but stopped this as the repairs were not lasting.
A rather dull Youtube video of replacing an HDR-1000S hard drive has been viewed over 7,200 times and has no cats or scantily clad women in it.
Funny when you go to Humax Direct shop to their refurbished models they never offer HDR-1000S, always ‘out of stock’, yet they must have a big pile of old ones https://www.humaxdirect.co.uk/refurbished.html
I would be interested to see the responses if a sticky was put on the forum ‘Has your HDR-1000S hard drive failed/lost all recordings? YES/NO’.
Anyway I now have an 1100S and so far everything’s fine so I am no longer persuing this and (you’ll be pleased to hear) have no more to say. Kind regards.
Whatever the statistics of the failure rate, the fact remains that if you are in the ‘HDD failure or motherboard failure club’ you have LOST your recordings. In the IT world, proprietary disk recovery software will often make a success out of a disaster, and provided you have the encryption key, then encrypted files can usually be recovered. My gripe is that it seems in Humax world, if you have the ‘problem’ you are locked out of your old recordings. That is the problem.
I’m still crossing my fingers, but equally thinking about how I can escape this potential ‘prison’ into a non-Humax Freesat world.
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