I would try a disk format and factory reset. Because the drive was set to Sata 3 it may not be correctly installed.

matthew – 24 minutes ago  » 

Thank you so much Graham for your help and assistance.

I got the feeling straight away you knew what you’re talking about!

Just before I went to reformat the drive in the Humax, I wondered if the pins I put the jumper pin on where the right ones. After all, the diagram in the documentation didn’t really match the drive. I wondered if the order of the pins was different, like I was looking at the drive the wrong way up!

…so I decided I’d put a jumper pin on (what I thought was) pins 3 and 4 (when I thought I’d already put them on the right pins 5 and 6)

Well, pins 3 and 4 where not pins 3 and 4, they where actually 5 and 6.

I know, because it worked! It completely resolved the “HDD not available Check HDD” error

So I conclude:

If you want to replace the harddisk in Humax, you need to make sure the HD has the ability to do a ‘slow’ transfer speed of 1.5 Gb/s. Any speed higher than this will cause the “HDD not available Check HDD” error. For my HD this required some jumper pins to be placed across pins 5 and 6 (but its not obvious which are which pins – don’t assume you’re looking at the pins the right way up!)

I can’t see why a larger disk would not work, like a 3TB or 4TB

There’s no need for the Humax device to actually do the format, so long as you partition and format the drive correctly (as I had)

The drive I chose, is super quiet and it really doesn’t get hot at all. Really ideal for this type of device. I think I’ll buy a similar device for my QNAP NAS as that drive does get very hot at times.

The drive I used:

WD AV 2TB 3.5″ SATA Media Hard Drive

Optimised for media & set-top box use

SATA-III 6Gb/s Interface

5400rpm / 64MB cache

3yr warranty

I hope this post will help others. Feel free to make a comment “me too!”

You can use a larger drive but be aware.

Drives larger than 1TB cannot be set up by the Foxsat. They require the correct partitioning and formatting to be created externally ideally using a PC booted into Linux (Requires some Linux knowledge).

A large number of files can significantly slow down the response to the media button.

Pleased you got it to work

You can identify the correct pins by orientating the drive so that the power and data connections are aligned as per the WD help online files.

Incidentally I should have told you if you wan’t the maximum space for video, immediately after formatting elect to format both the video and Music/Photo partitions. This gives you the option to reduce the Music/Photo partition to it’s smallest allowed size. If you wan’t to do it now you will have to export your recordings to USB (or to a PC if you have the custom firmware) and copy them back afterwards.