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Replacing Hard drive on 9300T

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    fozzie bear

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    My 83 year old father has a 9300T which has been working fine until recently. However now when he switches the recorder on, the Recording Schedule icon, normally at the top of the list, is missing from the menu. Also when he powers on it asks if he wishes to format the hard drive.
    I emailed Humax technical support and as I suspected they said it was likely a hard drive failure.
    I am an IT engineer so used to changing and preparing hard drives etc. but never opened up a Humax so a few quick questions please:-
    1) Is the internal drive EIDE or SATA. If the latter is it SATA I or II (probably to old to be III).
    2) If SATA I will the later vII or vIII drives work OK or is the 9300T finicky about drives? If not I was considering the WD Red drives which are designed for 24 x 7 operation.
    3) I assume the OS on these boxes is some sort of Linux distro. Is the OS actually on the drive or held in NVram?
    4) Can the system format a new unpartitioned drive or do I need to run a linux Live CD and partition and format the drive first?
    5) I have read on these forums about a command line utility which can run on Windows to copy recordings but ideally unless the drive is completely shot would like to copy them to the new drive. Is this fairly easy to do from a Linux live CD?
    Ps I am aware of the warninsg about the open frame switching power supply so will be very careful when working on this box.

    Many thanks
    Fozzie

    | Thu 6 Nov 2014 17:29:42 #1 |
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    Martin Liddle

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    fozzie bear - 1 hour ago  » 
    I emailed Humax technical support and as I suspected they said it was likely a hard drive failure.

    I assume that actually formatting the drive achieves nothing? If that is the case then I agree this is a classic case of hard drive failure.

    1) Is the internal drive EIDE or SATA. If the latter is it SATA I or II (probably to old to be III).
    2) If SATA I will the later vII or vIII drives work OK or is the 9300T finicky about drives? If not I was considering the WD Red drives which are designed for 24 x 7 operation.

    The drive is a 3.5" SATA II drive. You would do better to consider a drive specifically designed for PVR usage. This is one drive that is suitable Link to EBuyer

    3) I assume the OS on these boxes is some sort of Linux distro. Is the OS actually on the drive or held in NVram?

    The OS has nothing to do with Linux. It is held in NVRAM.

    4) Can the system format a new unpartitioned drive

    Yes. Fit the new drive, power the box up, it will notice the new drive and offer to format it; less than five seconds later the job will be done.

    5) I have read on these forums about a command line utility which can run on Windows to copy recordings but ideally unless the drive is completely shot would like to copy them to the new drive. Is this fairly easy to do from a Linux live CD?

    There is a utility humaxrw that comes in Windows and Linux flavours. It will certainly allow you to copy off material if the drive is not completely dead. There have been some reports of people copying back to a 9300 but more reports that it doesn't work. I know for certain that it does work for a 9200 but can't guarantee anything for a 9300. Humaxrw is straightforward to use if you are used to command line programs.

    | Thu 6 Nov 2014 19:08:14 #2 |
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    fozzie bear

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    WOW That was a quick reply :D. Many thanks Martin for the info.

    I must admit I haven't actually tried formatting the drive. I didn't want to lose any recorded programs but my father tells me there is nothing he is worried about losing so will try a reformat of the existing drive first before buying a replacement

    I will probably go for the AV drive you recommend as the smallest available WD Red is 1Tb and he will never use all that space.

    Thanks also for the info on backing up but as I said above this is probably not necessary now.

    I have worked on and upgraded several Tivo Mk1 boxes but not opened a Humax PVR so will be interested to see how it works.

    Fozzie

    | Fri 7 Nov 2014 13:36:10 #3 |
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    Andy_GG

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    Hi Martin,

    I have a similar issue to Fozzie and need help!

    I have a 9300t 320Gb and wanted to upgrade the drive; I'm having to constantly manage capacity and it's getting 'glitchy'. The plan was to put the new disk in, format it and if all was well, transfer the files from the old disk. Unfortunately I hit a snag; here's what happened:

    1) I bought a WD10EURX, which is a 1Tb SATA III disk.
    2) Replaced the 320Gb Disk
    3) Formatted new 1Tb disk in PVR
    4) Checked I could see it within HDD control and was able to see full capacity of disk, with 8Gb reserved
    5) Pressed record to test and it seemed to be working ok but when attempting to play back, nothing had been recorded (Timebar from 00:00 - 00:00). Also, clock on front of PVR remained at 00:00
    6) Box would frequently reboot
    7) Replaced new disk with old disk and the unit works fine again.

    I don't believe the issue is the SATA version, as the new SATA III disk should be backwardly compatible with SATA I, plus I don't think it would have got as far as it did. I hope I haven't wasted my money on a disk size which the box can't handle.

    If the disk is to hefty, is there a work around to get it working?

    Please can you help me out/advise?

    Many thanks,
    Andy.

    | Fri 7 Nov 2014 15:25:53 #4 |

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