Disk not being recognised in unit or in Windows

E

Ed Ludlow

Member
Hi all.

Trying to move things off my parents' old PVR-9150T HD to then FTP them onto their new HDR-FOXT2.

I jumped the gun a bit, and after connecting the HD to my PC with a SATA adaptor HD dock thing, I allowed Windows to "initialise" the disk"...whoops.

Now looking at the documentation for humaxrw / humaxcheck, I need to run humaxcheck -p but when doing this I'm getting:

"no humax partitions are found" :(

I can see that this is definitely the correct disk - in Windows Disk Management it's just showing as "unallocated".

Is there anything anyone can suggest? If I plug the drive back into the Humax, I just get the message at startup "Do you want to format a hard drive?" - obviously I say no...
Thanks,
Ed
 
Ed Ludlow said:
I jumped the gun a bit, and after connecting the HD to my PC with a SATA adaptor HD dock thing, I allowed Windows to "initialise" the disk"...whoops.
Click to expand...
I think whoops is probably about the right word. Seem that you let Windoze format the drive. I hope there wasn't any thing really important on it. You are unlikely to be able to recover anything without spending a load of cash on data recovery. But someone else may know better.
Although it seems a bit irrelevant now, are the files from the PVR-9150T compatible with the FOX T2?
 
I think they are - I took my files from my old PVR-3000 onto my FOX T2 and it was quite happy.

So it's actually formatted the drive - bugger. I hoped it had just changed the boot sector or similar - it gave absolutely no warning of formatting, and must have done it in seconds?! What a pain.

Oh well, looks like I'll be buying them the Downton Abbey latest box set :(
 
Thanks for the reply though.

It was this line:

Do not allow Windows to "Initialise" the disk in disk/device manager. The disk should not appear under "My Computer". If this is done accidentally use the "-p" option to HumaxCheck to fix the partition table.

from the HumaxRW Wiki that gave me hope - however it didn't work for me...
 
Ed Ludlow said:
Do not allow Windows to "Initialise" the disk in disk/device manager. The disk should not appear under "My Computer". If this is done accidentally use the "-p" option to HumaxCheck to fix the partition table.

from the HumaxRW Wiki that gave me hope - however it didn't work for me...
Click to expand...
So what was the actual command line you issued?
 
Absolutely nothing through the command line. Windows showed a pop up saying something like "do you want Windows to initialise the disk" and I (stupidly) click yes...that's all I did...
 
It didn't format the drive, just buggered about with the partition table. It might be possible to restore it if someone knows what it should contain.
 
Ah, sorry.

humaxcheck.exe 1: -p

humaxcheck version 0.10W (c) xyz321
Writes to the Humax disk are disabled
No Humax partitions found
 
Ed Ludlow said:
That's what I'm hoping, and keeping my fingers crossed!
Click to expand...

The initialize will have overwritten the partition table with a blank version, as Black Hole said. All the data will still be there, but inaccessible. Think of a library. Someone went in and cut every page out of every book and threw them all on the floor. Those books were your recordings, except it's worse than that because all the books were in a foreign language you can't read and all the pages are an identical format, so you have no clue what page belongs to what book.
 
Mike0001 said:
The initialize will have overwritten the partition table with a blank version
Click to expand...
I think you mean the file allocation table. It isn't that simple though as the disk was originally in Humax format which might not even store its allocation table in the same place as FAT so it could still be recoverable. @xyz321 would know!
 
af123 said:
I think you mean the file allocation table.
Click to expand...

No, I meant the partition table. As far as I know, Windows Initialize only alters that. I don't think it makes assumptions about what partitions and what sorts of partitions will later be made. It just creates a default Windows partition table, clearly inconsistent with what this machine expects, and ignoring any pre-existing partitions, which should still be there, but are now inaccessible.
 
The -p option to humaxcheck is supposed to recreate a valid Humax partition table (and it does on a 9200 at least). According to the release notes it should work on a 9300. We need xyz321 who wrote it to comment. Clutching at straws does humaxcheck 1: -n -p work any better? I take it that 1: is the correct drive number?
 
Same thing - "No Humax partitions found" :(

Definitely 1: - confirmed by the fact that the appropriate drive just spun up and I tried that last command..

I've messaged xzy123.
 
MartinLiddle said:
The -p option to humaxcheck is supposed to recreate a valid Humax partition table (and it does on a 9200 at least). According to the release notes it should work on a 9300. We need xyz321 who wrote it to comment. Clutching at straws does humaxcheck 1: -n -p work any better? I take it that 1: is the correct drive number?
Click to expand...

The documentation certainly says that, but whatever disk 1: is pointing to is clearly not recognized as a Humax disk, either because it never was or because now it is a Windows disk.

Ed: this is very dangerous. Get the disk wrong and you will lose your PC too! Heed Martin's warning!

Edit: Looks like you did choose the correct drive! So humaxcheck maybe needs the MBR to be in the correct format. Let's just hope xyz123 has a default MBR you can DD in.
 
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