Fan is in top left of photo behind HDD red and white wires to it

Billibob – 11 minutes ago  » 

I now have usb hub for SATA drive. The HDD from my HDR runs up fine. Disk Utility on my Mac can see the drive which has three master boot record partitions

partition 1; 1.8gb

partition 2; 998.38gb

partition 3; 10.74gb

But does not recognise the format so the drive will not mount. So hard drive is working and partitioned but I do not know what format to expect. I also run Windows 7 as a virtual machine, result much the same PC knows there is a drive there but can’t see anything on it. Any one know what format Humax use? I am tempted just to reformat it FAT install it back in the HDR and see if it offers me an option to format it. But befor I do that I will connect it on usb and see if the Humax can see it but I will wait for replies first.

The disk will have Linux EXT3 file system The recording partition is LUKS encrypted.

Billibob – 29 minutes ago  » 

Yes that’s correct thanks I have tried it on my Linux virtual machine and the Linux machine can read the file system cannot read files. So drive looks good. I will try it in HDR on usb tomorrow.

Thanks for help

You are welcome

You should of course see the partitions, but of course not the recording files. Had you uploaded video/jpeg photos or MP3 audio they should be visible on the drive when connected to a usb port.

I think this is correct, the freetime boxes are the first to support read/write to NTFS volumes, without additional software.

Earlier Freeview+ boxes like the HDR FOX T2, could read but not write to NTFS.

As you say there are a few .png images and an MP4 files from itv player I can find and view so am pretty sure this drive is okay. So problem remains unresolved.

Well what a waste of a morning I will never see again.

I offered the HDD to the HDR-1000s on USB it saw it and offered to format it as an external drive. I didn’t do this as I now am pretty sure it fully working and correctly formatted EXT3/4 as a SATA internal drive.

While it was connected I went to the storage section of the menu where it was correctly shown as 988gb usb drive. I also checked the media share section although the partitions were available no files could be seen, as you would expect, as they are encrypted. I refitted the drive in the 1000s it spun up quite happily and both the 12 and 5 volt SATA supplies were present, correct and stable. I then decided to download reinstall the 2.02.46 firmware update, as its looking less and less like a hardware problem. Although my USB stick was correctly formatted and I followed instructions to the letter the update refused to run giving a [015] USB storage error.

So now, unless anyone has a better idea, I am going to format the drive and used it as a backup disk in my Mac, chuck the rest in the bin and swear never to buy Humax again.

My HDR 1000S has the hard disk problem as described here – on and off over the summer – after the last update in July.

Symptoms including all recordings are “lost”, system cannot see the internal HDD, cannot record after formatting external HDD.

Between July and mid Nov, it occurred 3 or 4 times, came and went.

The symptoms last for from a few days to about 1 week.

I did contacted support several times – they are courteous but provided no fix.

In mid Nov, the problem recurred and never recovered – it now have trouble with on demand too.

Troubleshooting included:

Have opened the box to check for bad connection.

Downgrade firmware to 1.00 something and also rollback to the last version before July.

I do not believe there is issue with HDD itself as most HDD is very reliable these days.

Do not have much time to troubleshoot so got a new 1100S and hope this one will not have the same problem.

The old HDR 1000S can be programmed from ipad app.

Rarely use the ipad app so did not bother doing that for the HDR 1100S.