HDD Upgrade On Humax PVR

Not My Work Taken From Elsewhere
Not Tested By Me Either

Hard Drive Upgrade plus hidden menu

--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
upgrade the hard disk in the unit from 320GB to 1TB with no problems.

Existing drive: Seagate pipeline 320GB

New Drive : Western Digital WD10 EVCS serial ATA.

Upgrade is very striaght forward, fan and HD is held within plastic caddy. Remove caddy screws x 4, then swap drive.

When you power up the unit it detects new drive and asks you to format it, 5 mins later job done.

975GB for video/radio and 25GB for photo/music.

Now you have a bigger drive you can allocate more space to photo/music.

To do this the drive needs to be formatted again, so therefore suggest this is done after upgrade to aviod losing recorded items.

select: menu/system/hdd control

format HDD

select both video/radio and photo/music tick boxes

enter pin

you then get a sliding bar left to right on the hdd allocation, this is simply moved to select the amount you require, select ok, hdd formats again, job done.

I set mine to 50GB for photo/music which should be enough.

Hidden Menu :

menu/system/diagnostics

then

red green yellow blue
green yellow blue

Some interesting stuff in here !!!

( be carefull what you select !!)

Finally,

As for bugs ( well not really a bug, more a pain. )

I Set the unit to record the football last night, box gave option to record in SD or HD. Set HD option.

ITV it would appear did not transmit the football in HD only SD, therefore box never recorded anything !!!

One might say that the box is working correctly, it is, however it would have been nice for the recording to drop back to SD as the HD was cancelled.

This will be one to watch out for with future programs.

Click to expand...

Thanks Rat and thanks to the original author for the work. Humax freesat dvr seems to be a very good box in every way.

there is also another way by all accounts

foxsatdisk home

foxsat-hdr home

not totally read all through this myself as yet,just sharing what Ive found on my search's
and I dont have the HDR as yet :Cry: lol

Excellent progress, its good the file system is linux based and not encrypted.
Funny we were talking about this happening at any time Rat The best thing to do with any new expensive toy is take it apart and plug bits in to other places lol. I think Mh let us down by not getting it done first

it was us speaking about it that made me search harder P

now all I need to do is save all my Christmas money,sell some stuff on ebay,sell my foxsat and wait for the PVR to be in stock lol

just hope members get some benifit from what is posted

Rat said:

it was us speaking about it that made me search harder P

now all I need to do is save all my Christmas money,sell some stuff on ebay,sell my foxsat and wait for the PVR to be in stock lol

just hope members get some benifit from what is posted

Click to expand...

Dont forget the 'sell your soul to the devil' bit too ;-)

i think its awesome the box is quite happy to have you change the hdd, dont you have to do something a little extra to get the sky+ boxes to accept a new hdd??

also as for that problem with not recording, im sure if enough people complain it'll be fixed in a future firmware revision

I am already toying with the idea

I have seen a 1.5TB Drive at Scan for a reasonable amount of penny's

It seems a very straight forward procedure,

There are also rumours of them adding mkv functionality also

Hi, I have the aforesaid Humax hd PVR and fancy doing the hard disk upgrade.
The one quoted is a Western Digital WD10 EVCS serial ATA.
I cannot find the exact model, the nearest I have found is :-
Western Digital WD10 EADS Serial ata.
Can anyone advise me if this is suitable? Or if not where I will find one that is and give the model No.
Thanks
Boyd

I have a foxsat and have swapped the disc for a 1TB samsung F2 ecogreen Samsung EcoGreen F2 1TB Hard Drive SATAII 32MB Cache - OEM - Ebuyer. It works fine so far. I also discovered that the USB port will export HD recordings to an external drive that has been formatted and set up in the Foxsat. The SD files play fine on my PC but the HD ones won't play. If I try to play an HD file on the external disc on the Foxsat the picture and sound break up.
I will try copying the HD back onto the Foxsat and see if that works sometime this weekend so more anon.

Just checked and my overnight HD recording is perfect.

Further progress. I have now done two upgrades using the samsung drive and both are working OK.
I can copy off SD and HD recordings from the Samsung drives to the original drives by connecting them through the USB port using a SATA drive caddy. HD recordings will not play properly through the USB port. I don't think that this is due to bandwidth but is due to encryption. See below. If the HD recording is copied back onto the original drive via the USB it plays OK but won't copy out again. This doesn't really matter as once its on the external drive it can be copied and stored using Ext2 Volume manager program to connect the linux formatted drive to a windows PC using a SATA caddy.
If an HD recording is copied onto a Humax recorder other than the original it won't play. It is reported as not available or encrypted. Very annoying as this means if a box breaks it takes out all the HD recordings made on it. Any thoughts on how to make recordings movable between boxes would be very welcome. I've just got a PCIe HD Sat card for my PC to see whether the original transmission is encoded. More anon.
I want to save some recordings to play on my TVIX 4100 and I have had success with SD recordings as follows: Use TSremux v0.0.21.2 (with Bypass Audio Alignment and Use Async I/o both checked) to convert the Humax TS file to m2ts. Select the audio track you want to keep. There are often two. The lower number audio is the standard track the higher is the audio description track. If you want to trim the begining and end set the timers accordingly. You can check timing accurately by watching the m2ts file in Nero then rerun TSmuxer if necessary. I find that TSremux accurately preserves the delay time of the audio whereas TSmuxer constantly gets it wrong. After this you will have a standard format m2ts file at 25fps and 720 by 576 which will play perfectly on a TVIX and can be converted to other formats. Attempting the same process with HD recordings gives a corrupted or non standard file format warning regardless of whether the file has been copied through the USB or is on the original disc. Hence I think it is being encrypted when it is recorded with a signature which includes an identifier for the box.
Finally regarding accessing the internal drive, I have bought some SATA extender cables which carry both the power and sata connection on a flat strip. I use these with my TVIX to have the drive external to the box as the TVIX4100 will not play HD m2ts files smoothly through the USB port because of an inadequate buffer and bandwith. They play perfectly using a direct SATA connection. I just lay the bare drive on top of the TVIX. It stays cool enough withou a fan and is very easy to swap. I think the same process would work with the Humax though its not very tidy.

Editing radio recordings is a bit more tedious. If you just want to extract the mpa file a straight run through TSmuxer set to demux works fine. Unfortunately if you try to use the split and cut option to trim off unwanted recording it generates a zero length file. TSremux will do the editing properly but for some reason generates a file approximately twice as big as you started with. The solution is to save the TSremux output as an m2ts file then run this through TSmuxer set to demux. You then get an edited mpa file, shorter than the original recording which can be converted to other formats.

I have also fitted a Samsung EcoGreen F2 HD103SI 1TB (Komplett.ie - Samsung EcoGreen F2 HD103SI 1TB)

No problems at all, copied the contents and file structure across using Paragon Drive Copy V9.0. All original stuff perfect and subsequent recordings both SD & HD perfect. For €69.00 a great mod..roud:

Cheers

I fitted a laptop size (2.5") 320gb into my HDR. Very quiet and also helps keep the box temp down :Clap:

....plus it was easily fast enough to record two hd streams and watch another :Clap: