Humax HDR issues

I wasn’t really sure where to post this as it could veer off into hacking etc. but the HDD seems to be the issue initially. My dad’s just had his third Humax (HDR 1000s) die on him, the disc suddenly insists on being formatted which to me sounds like the HDD is on it’s way out.

He was looking for alternative Personal Video Recorders but couldn’t find anything that matched the specs for FreeSat and ‘Access to Players’(?). So I think he’s just got another Humax (HDR 1100s).

He’s asking me whether it’s possible to
a) reviving the HDD on the 1000s
b) backing up the files on the Humax so he doesn’t keep loosing them all the time
c) replacing the software on the Humax giving better functionality (making backups easier).

He sent me a few links to converting the Humax format to something more compatible. Also a link to hacking the Humax but it looked like an absolute nightmare to do. So any advice appreciated with this.

That’s an issue with a lot of Humax receivers. I worked for a pay TV company for a while and our policy was basically to replace the receivers with internal HDDs with ones that had them external.

They died a lot less for some reason.

But for the questions

I doubt is, when an HDD dies it’s pretty much dead.

Not really, you can clone the old HDD and hope that it works (I’m not sure how their encryption works internally, but I assume device ID).

Possible, but haven’t read much into it.

So you’re saying that if he attached an external drive to the USB port on the Humax, then for some reason there may be less chance of drive problems?

I saw a video on replacing the Humax drive and they suggested a purple drive as they’re used for surveillance. Good point that it may be encrypted, something to bare in mind if we do try it.

I’m not sure if/how the USB ports work on this particular model. The ones we had had the USB disabled except for power, the drive was attached via eSATA. The problem is if the internal drive fails then the software goes kinda haywire. Our receivers were without HDD by default, the HDD was optional

My dad got back to me reminding me that we tried a 2TB external but the HDR1000s could only read from the drive, we couldn’t manage to copy to the external.

I did find this page that claims that it’s possible to remove the drive, make a copy and even remove files, then plug it back in for it to still work. He didn’t replace the drive though so that’s still to be tested.

I suppose the main priority is to backup the drive, so I’ll see how that goes when I get my hands on it.

Yeah that’s what I expected, but it probably depends on the recording. Free TV stuff is unencrypted so it’s only natural you can just copy it off, but paytv content is probably encrypted on a file level. Not sure if you can just open them.

Depends what was recorded tho.

BTW: I’m by no means saying anything of the above will work, just that’s my experience with them from work.

Ah, okay. That makes things more interesting. I rarely watch TV so my knowledge is very limited on this. I have a feeling it’s just going to get very complicated, we’ll have to try and see. Thanks for your help so far.

I was looking around online for other boxes that received Freesat other than Humax but there was really only a Manhatten box. However I did discover that you could get a lot of different make of receivers and wondered if it was possible to setup a PC to record what was received? Webrips come to mind but of the ones I’ve seen the quality is always a bit off, halfway between 720p and a movie recorded with a mobile.

Saying that though, my dad’s new Humax 1100s has two years warranty on it so all this is just experimentation out of curiosity now.

There are a ton of TV cards with which recording is possible. On a PC you will only be able to record Free channels anyway. Encrypted channels would need a card and/or CI(+) module, which will most likely restrict recording anyway.

Hi again. I finally managed to get my hands on the Humax 1000S. I took out the 3.5 HDD and tried to recover the files but after many hours received the message that there was a problem with the file system (or it just didn’t exist) and therefore I couldn’t continue with the recovery. The file system is / has become RAW and I can’t get any further without formatting the drive.

My dad told me that when he saw the message from the Humax that there was a problem with the drive and it needed to be formatted, he chose yes. The drive is empty when in Windows but recovery software shows various files (MAC address numbers?) that shows there are files there. If I format the drive to get it to an NTFS state, would it still be possible to recover the files or would another format make recovery even more difficult?

If you want to recover any files do not, under any circumstances write to the drive in any shape or form.

Clone the drive to a second drive or disk image and play with that.

Well I copied / cloned the drive and ran the recovery software again. There was only 113MB of data there. Lots of $Extend, $Secure, $RmMetadata, $Repair and so on but nothing that looked like a potential video file. My dad said it was a third full.

Realising that there was basically no hope of recovery I did the same on the actual drive and the outcome was the same.

Could have played with different partition types on the copy. Though I don’t know how far that would get you really.

Would that have made a difference? The fact it found barely anything made me think there was no point carrying on. I don’t want to spend days digging deeper only to find the odd video here and there. Sorry but it was just a case of pretty much all or nothing.

Really not sure how far it could have got you. To be honest I haven’t really don’t much of data rescue so far, so not sure what steps can be taken :smile: