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FoxSat Fault & Moving Hard Drive?

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    TriChris

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    My FoxSAT HD500 PVR (Bought summer of 2012) has started to play up.
    It stopped responding to the remote or the front panel buttons.
    Powercycling brings up BBC1 with sound o.k. but it won't change channels and volume up puts the volume bar on the screen but then it stays stuck on the screen.

    Any ideas?
    Doesn't sound like a PSU problem to me! But I'm not a PVR expert. Though I can change capacitors etc.

    If I can't fix it is there any way of watching the stored programs?
    i.e. If I put the hard drive in a USB drive enclosure and plugged it into another PVR?
    I suspect they would just appear as files without program name, date etc.

    I asked Humax if I bought a current model could I then watch the programs via an external drive but "We have no information on that" Humax have never seemed to want to help their customers!
    I may have bought a new Humax if it let me watch my recorded programs.

    Any recommendations for a replacement?

    Thanks Chris

    | Wed 20 May 2015 15:10:23 #1 |
  2. grahamlthompson

    grahamlthompson

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    Have you tried a reset to factory defaults ? The drive is formatted EXT 3 so you need a PC booted into Linux or a EXT2/3 driver to read the disk

    | Wed 20 May 2015 15:16:20 #2 |
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    TriChris

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    Thanks for the tip. I tried a factory reset, but it is still playing up. It took me six or seven attempts to go through the installation wizard as by the time it got to postcode entry it was so slow that '22' wouldn't bring up B I eventually managed to enter the post code via one of the alternative 'keyboards'.

    Could it be a PSU capacitor problem?
    It doesn't sound like typical symptoms for that.

    I understand about reading ext2/3 formats but how would a get them to be played by a new PVR attached to the telly. I don't want to watch them via a PC.

    Thanks for any assistance. Chris

    | Thu 21 May 2015 9:32:41 #3 |
  4. grahamlthompson

    grahamlthompson

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    TriChris - 3 minutes ago  » 
    Thanks for the tip. I tried a factory reset, but it is still playing up. It took me six or seven attempts to go through the installation wizard as by the time it got to postcode entry it was so slow that '22' wouldn't bring up B I eventually managed to enter the post code via one of the alternative 'keyboards'.
    Could it be a PSU capacitor problem?
    It doesn't sound like typical symptoms for that.
    I understand about reading ext2/3 formats but how would a get them to be played by a new PVR attached to the telly. I don't want to watch them via a PC.
    Thanks for any assistance. Chris

    The Foxsat-hdr doesn't normally have power supply capacitor issues (The Foxsat-HD does though). No harm in checking the power supply for any sign of bulging capacitors.

    You can transfer SD recordings to another box but HD recordings are encrypted so will only play back on the Foxsat-hdr that recorded the content.

    One last thing to try, will the box boot up with the hard disk disconnected ? If it does, it points to a hard disk problem. In that case you may be able to copy your recordings partition to a PC and restore them to a new hard disk.

    | Thu 21 May 2015 9:43:29 #4 |
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    TriChris

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    I have a confession to make. It seems many (but not all) of the problems were the remote batteries getting low. There was enough power to perform a few actions but then it was getting too low. Doing a power cycle was long enough for the remote to recover enough to work again for a few presses. My excuse is that they were atypical symptoms, we didn't have to get closer to get it to work like you normally do when a remote's batteries are low.
    I haven't had a chance to test it fully since putting new batteries in but so far it has not faulted.
    Though I can't see how the very first symptom could have been low remote battery related. Using channel up or down worked but for about a second the screen went blue before the channel appeared (my TV will go blue when it doesn't see any signal i.e. if we turn the FoxSAT box off)

    | Fri 22 May 2015 12:14:33 #5 |
  6. grahamlthompson

    grahamlthompson

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    Did you try using the channel up/down buttons on the box itself ?

    | Fri 22 May 2015 12:46:52 #6 |
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    TriChris

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    Good question. I'm sure I did, but now I'm starting to doubt myself. If it plays up in the same way again I will be sure to try.
    Thanks for all the help.

    | Fri 22 May 2015 15:06:38 #7 |

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