As quite a few of these type of discussion forums seem to just fizzle out and you never find out if anyone found a suitable solution or just gave up in frustration, I thought I’d give this one a proper ending and let you know where I got to and how.
The recording list on my 9300T suddenly became corrupted as it was blank but the hard drive showed 50-odd% used.
Thanks to guidance from Martin Liddle on this forum I was able to recover the recordings to my pc but was unable to put them back onto my Humax despite spending a whole day off work trying (and installing/uninstalling the hard-drive in the Humax well over 10 times), but I have a work-around as you’ll see.
As most of the discussions advise, switch off the Humax at the mains before opening it up & I’ve also seen advice to leave it a minute or so for any residual charge in capacitors to dissipate. Also, obviously poking around inside the unit with screwdrivers can easily cause short circuits and permanent damage, so please proceed at your own risk.
As there is no USB output or anything from the 9300T, I whipped the lid off (5 screws) and carefully removed the hard drive – 4 screws hold the mounting plate with the HDD on it onto the chassis of the Humax (I found it easier to leave the connector lead attached until the HDD was free from the unit as it is quite tight and there is a capacitor right next to the connector I didn’t want to nudge whilst trying to unplug it in-situ.
I then had to remove the mounting plate (4 more screws with rubber shock absorbing bushes) to fit the HDD into my docking caddy to attach it to my pc, you may not need to do this if you’re just using leads.
WARNING – If Windows asks you to initialise the disk, DO NOT.
As the HDD is formatted for Humax, my Windows 10 pc did not immediately recognise the drive, but I found out later that it does show up in Disk Management (right click on the windows icon in the bottom left of the screen and select Disk Management) you may need to scroll down until you find the drive in the bottom half of the disk management screen, mine was disk 7.
I downloaded Humaxrw from the link below
https://myhumax.org/forum/topic/humaxrw
There is a very nice easy to use Windows-like interface here for the simple copying functions of HumaxRW (see link below), but it didn’t work to recover my ‘lost’ recordings.
https://myhumax.org/forum/topic/humaxrw-gui-front-end-1
Now comes the tricky part for any novice like me, using Windows PowerShell.
Right click on the windows icon in the bottom left of the screen and select Windows PowerShell (Admin).
This opens a ‘command line shell’ basically a window that you have to type commands into like some kind of hacker, very intimidating at first, but this is how to get Humax RW to work and looks really cool when you get it to work. You’ll get a window with something like this in it:
PS C:\WINDOWS\system32>
You now have to direct the computer to where the HumaxRW program is stored when you downloaded it. I had to change drives first by typing f:
PS F:\>
Then change directory to my downloads folder by typing cd downloads
PS F:\downloads>
Then cd humaxrw
PS F:\downloads\humaxrw>
Now you can start typing commands to try to find the recordings on your Humax HDD. The README file in the HumaxRW folder contains a list of commands, but I have noticed they are missing a crucial .\ before each command as follows:
PS F:\downloads\humaxrw> .\humaxrw 7: -r -l
(Where the 7 represents the number your Humax HDD is showing up as).
As my recording list was corrupt, I had to use the .\humaxrw 7: -r -l command to list my missing recordings, then .\humaxrw 7: -r -g 10-12,18
(where the numbers correspond to the numbers in your recovered recording list) to copy the recovered recordings to the same folder on your pc that the HumaxRW program is stored in.
They will be displayed as ‘recover_12.ts’ etc, they will have associated .epg, .elu and .hre files with them, but it is the .ts file that you should be able to play on the pc with programs like VLC player.
It is at this stage that you may be able to rename and copy the files back to your Humax HDD or even a new one, but that was beyond my patience/skill level and I am very grateful to have got my missing recordings back anyway.
To complete the story, I ordered a new Seagate Video HDD 500GB,Internal,5900 RPM,8.89 cm 3.5" SATA 3 Hard Drive from ebay that was so easy to fit (reverse of removing the old one) and format in Humax (takes seconds).
I did spend a day trying and failing to get my old recordings onto it, they looked like they were copying but when I reinstalled the drive in the Humax the recording list was blank.
I’m not entirely sure if the old Humax hard drive was faulty but didn’t want to risk it, now I have a new one with larger capacity and if the machine fails again at least I’ll know it’s not the HDD at fault. I have formatted the old Humax drive via my pc and used it to back up/store photos and music.
The workaround I mentioned is that our Samsung TV that was new 2 years ago has a USB input on it and the recovered *.ts files on the pc play just fine from a USB stick or removable USB hard drive.
I hope this may be useful to anyone else in my predicament. Thanks again to all the helpful contributors on My Humax Forum, especially those who wrote the useful HumaxRW utilities/applications.
Not to editors/admin, if you notice any errors please let me know and I’ll correct them.
| Sat 3 Mar 2018 15:20:49
#16 |
