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HDR-FOX T2 HDD Replacement

Thank you so much for your detailed description of each factor and step of the process. I have just replaced my aged 500GB hard drive after I thought it was the aerial problems but after reading your post I realised it was largely the old HDD. The humax started not booting up fully, first freezing on starting, then ok the second time, then not starting properly more frequently before it started properly. So I think I got to it in the nick of time.
I put in a seagate Seahawk 2T drive this morning and was just so impressed by how easy it was once I read your guide. I'm certain I wouldn't have tackled this without your help.
I also formatted an old external hard drive using AOMEI Partition assistant free version to ext3 via my windows laptop. That drive took over a day to copy all the recordings on to it, and is now coping across to my new Humax HDD. Just thought I would add this for windows users as it helps with backup for those without access to a mac or linux machine..
Many many thanks. I am very pleased with myself for achieving this.
 
Now been using the 'PVR' with the new HDD for 2+ months.
So a little update .. strange that the Sandberg HDD adapter would not work ... works fine on some other HDD.
Copying files overtook several days .. amazed how slow the USB interface on Fox T2 is .. but don't use it normally so no issue.

Had some minor issues originally - replaced all downloaded Apps and all things now working fine.
The biggest benefit - none of the odd glitches .... freezing, failed recording, encryption messages happen anymore ..... plus I now have twice the storage :)
Thanks to those with knowledge and patience to help resolve this.
 
Oh Dear... I've recently noticed our Fox T2 has been exhibiting "dropouts" in some recent recordings. It's vaguely reminiscent enough of the problems back in https://hummy.tv/forum/threads/humax-faults-v-serial-number.688/#post-13779 (good grief almost a decade ago... no wonder the system might be getting flaky) to make me think it may be the disk starting to go bad.... although so far as I can tell the box doesn't crash and reboot (like it used to in those days), playback of recordings older than a few weeks ago is still completely fine and watching live content slightly behind (which is presumably buffered by the disk) has yet to exhibit any issues. And in those days the crashed recordings would just have a missing 3 minutes skip; these days the dropouts are preceded by a burst of multicoloured macroblock mess.

The disk test thing in the settings menu says no problems (but I'm not sure it ever did, even when there clearly were disk issues like with the boxes we had to get replaced originally). I'm still not using the custom firmware so don't have "fixdisk" option mentioned earlier in the thread (not yet anyway... maybe this'll finally get me to take the plunge).

Before embarking on a full HDD replacement project (this thread is a fantastic resource)... I'm curious if anyone has any thoughts on how best to backup content over the ethernet interface? (Ours is still networked, from using iPlayer on it when that worked). Maybe not the full 2TB (yes, it's full of unwatched crud) but just of the subset of the backlog of stuff I'd be annoyed if it disappeared before I'd had a chance to watch it.

Enabling the FTP and MediaServer options and I can indeed obtain .ts files off the box via FTP from a desktop PC. However the files appear to be scrambled; I can't play them in Totem (Gnome Videos) or VLC (this is a Linux household). However .ts files obtained from the box's attached USB drive do not appear to be scrambled (this vaguely rings bells; something about the box scrambling content on it's HDD but unscrambling it when it copies it to an external USB drive... which is partly why such copying is so slow).

I can also browse the Hummy box's main drive (not the attached USB drive) from the desktop as a UPnP service using VLC or Totem. VLC can play content fine (but Totem not; not sure why).

I'm not really familiar with UPnP and media servers though. I could imagine scripting some FTP commands to pull lots of files off the box as a batch job via that route... but if they're scrambled they seem not much use (unless there's an easy way to unscramble?). Access via UPnP seems more promising - in that the content seems to be served up de-scrambled - but it's not obvious how to save the files or if it can be done faster than real-time (FTP is slow, but still an order of magnitude faster than real-time). Ideally I'd be looking for something to batch-copy from UPnP like it was a filesystem, or for something like curl or wget giving command line access to UPnP... any ideas?

Alternatively it might be easier to just obtain another external USB HDD and back-up onto that. But given that I currently have plenty of free disk space on my desktop machine but no spare external USB drives other than a few old ones with 10s of GBs only, the networked approach is more immediately attractive. Or is it basically a dumb idea?
 
Tim Day said:
The disk test thing in the settings menu says no problems
Click to expand...
Pointless. Use fixdisk, which could well solve the problem. I'm sure I've said so before, but basically the file system accumulates inconsistencies which although not fatal slow down the operating system accesses. Any modern file system (such as Ext3) has redundancy built in, and the inconsistencies can be resolved using the appropriate tools.

Tim Day said:
I'm still not using the custom firmware
Click to expand...
WTF??? Just do it. Don't come moaning about it playing up when you haven't even taken the first steps to stop it playing up. Warning: running fixdisk on a 2TB drive with loads of inconsistencies is going to take days... but at least it might save you needing a new drive.

My god, you have a lot of catching up to do!

Tim Day said:
Or is it basically a dumb idea?
Click to expand...
Very, very slow – you're likely to achieve 200MB/min by USB and maybe double that by network (the HDR-FOX itself being the bottleneck). That's roughly 80-160 hours for 2TB. Another problem of the UPnP approach is that you'll only get the .TS file and not the sidecars, and also (if you haven't been using CF to unprotect HiDef recordings) you won't get the HiDef at all.

Tim Day said:
or for something like curl or wget giving command line access to UPnP... any ideas?
Click to expand...
Simply install the samba package and use SMB. That way the HDR-FOX drive appears in your Windows file manager as a network drive, just like a NAS.

However, the sensible way to deal with backing up 2TB of data is to simply connect the drive directly to a SATA port in your PC. You'll need to boot Linux for the Ext3 file system (or install a utility). See Things Every... (click) section 12.
 
It's OK... this is a Linux household (several desktops and laptops). ext3/4 is the normal order of things round here....

Is fixdisk the same as fsck? Or does fixdisk does more/different things? (Cleanup of Hummy-specific data that fsck knows nothing about, for example). It would indeed probably be most straightforward to whack the drive onto a spare SATA port in a desktop and fsck it. It'd also be a way of getting a look at the SMART data too (not that I've ever seen that tell me anything useful about failing drives).

But of course once the drive was out of the hummy, I might as well image the drive to a replacement. And I just remembered that in my pile of unused PC bits I do have a decent size drive going spare... (unused, still sealed in packaging)... it's a 2TB Hitachi GST (good grief... 2009 vintage!). 7200RMP. 3.0Gb/s SATA. "LBA: 3.907.029.168 SECTORS. CHS: 16383/16/63." Likely to be any use as a replacement?

I think I'm just going to have to get over my irrational fear of opening up consumer electronics. It's daft... I am quite happy getting elbow deep in big-box PCs and messing with cards/RAM/CPUs/motherboards, but when it comes to "gadgets" (or laptops for that matter)... Horrors! Think it's something to do with the sheer fiddly awkwardness there always seems to be. (Have never looked in a Hummy though, yet!)

(Meanwhile... a bit more playing with the networking. VLC's UPnP view will get me a URL to something like
and then wget can retrieve that at 7m53s for 1.2GByte. (And the result does seem to be unscrambled, unlike FTP's results).
But ouch... yes that'd be getting on for 10 days non-stop to get everything off, even if I could automate it. Doesn't seem a very practical route at all; abandoning that approach!)
 
This is ridiculous (some may say pathetic). Just open the case (3 screws) and have a look. It's trivial to get the disk out.
You can decrypt the recordings on the PC. BH has documented all the ways of decrypting stuff. Just read it. And stop fannying about with UPnP, which is rubbish.

Fixdisk is a combination of fsck and smartctl. If you're going to fsck on the PC, then put the disk back in the Humax (having installed the CF of course - stop dithering and just do it) and do a Fixdisk run to check/fix the disk (rather than the filesystem which has already been done). It will be much quicker.
 
Tim Day said:
Hitachi GST (good grief... 2009 vintage!). 7200RMP. 3.0Gb/s SATA. "LBA: 3.907.029.168 SECTORS. CHS: 16383/16/63." Likely to be any use as a replacement?
Click to expand...
It should work, but that doesn't make it optimal.
Black Hole said:
Summary: 3½", SATA2, 5900rpm, "PVR", "surveillance", "CE", or "AV".
Click to expand...

I'm with prpr (in case I hadn't made myself clear): as you seem to be technically competent, I am absolutely mystified why you are dithering about installing CF which is/are the tool(s) you need. You have not even proven the HDD needs replacement yet.

Tim Day said:
I think I'm just going to have to get over my irrational fear of opening up consumer electronics. It's daft... I am quite happy getting elbow deep in big-box PCs and messing with cards/RAM/CPUs/motherboards, but when it comes to "gadgets" (or laptops for that matter)... Horrors!
Click to expand...
In many cases you are right – consumer gadgets are not made to be taken apart and things can go downhill quickly when plastic bits snap off. But that's not the case here: the HDR-FOX is made like a metal cased PC, and is very similar to a PC internally. HDR-FOX Commissioning, Disassembly, Repair (click)

You've been a member of this forum long enough, it's time you got a dunking.
 
Tim Day said:
I can also browse the Hummy box's main drive (not the attached USB drive) from the desktop as a UPnP service using VLC or Totem. VLC can play content fine (but Totem not; not sure why).
Click to expand...
VLC can be used to save the DLNA served content ((UPnP if you prefer) and is probably the quickest way of getting standard definition content off the box without the custom firmware; to get any high definition content off you would need custom firmware.
 
Tim Day said:
(Ours is still networked, from using iPlayer on it when that worked).
Click to expand...

iPlayer works fine on the HDR Fox-T2 if you install the iplfix package in the custom firmware. Well, it works as well as it ever did with all the crashes and hangs etc, but if it worked for you previously then iplfix will get it working again.
 
Hmmm... recording issues seem to have gone away. Recently recorded stuff has been completely glitch free. Possibly contributing factors were the glitchy recordings had overlapping record times (which must stress the disk more, recording 2 streams) and the box was down to less than 10GByte free, although never got full. Wonder if it goes a bit nuts leaping around a probably now rather fragmented disk hunting for free sectors as it gets near the limit? Have since freed up some space, but not tried any time-overlapping recordings yet. Will monitor for a while longer, unless it breaks first. Thanks for all the reassurance Something Can Be Done though!

Re iPlayer... since we got a latest generation Chromecast last year we just watch iPlayer via that these days.
 
Tim Day said:
Hmmm... recording issues seem to have gone away. Recently recorded stuff has been completely glitch free. Possibly contributing factors were the glitchy recordings had overlapping record times (which must stress the disk more, recording 2 streams) and the box was down to less than 10GByte free, although never got full. Wonder if it goes a bit nuts leaping around a probably now rather fragmented disk hunting for free sectors as it gets near the limit? ...
Click to expand...
On a normal working HDR, you should be able to record 2 HD channels simultaneously while watching a previous HD recording without issues or glitches (on the recording or during playback).
 
Tim Day said:
Will monitor for a while longer, unless it breaks first.
Click to expand...
You mean you are still putting it off? :rolleyes:
Black Hole said:
A file system is (essentially) a database structure. Storing a file on a disk means using the database indexes to locate some unallocated space, filling that space with the new data, linking to more space if necessary, and leaving a trail of pointers to all the sections of space allocated to that file so that it can be found and reconstructed when needed again. The indexes to unallocated space need to be updated so the space occupied by the file is no longer "unallocated".

How fragile a file system is depends on the amount of redundancy built into the database system. Suppose there is no redundancy: If the database becomes corrupted, eg because of a temporary or permanent disc sector failure, or because the system in turned off in the process of updating the pointers, then some or all of the data stored in the file system will become unreachable. With enough built-in resilience (redundancy), the file system can overcome minor glitches and the files remain reachable despite database inconsistencies. That is the major advantage of using modern file systems (eg Ext3) over old-fashioned ones (eg FAT).

Running the file system repair tools looks for inconsistencies in the database structure. If there is enough redundancy, the database can be completely rebuilt.

Hence the reason for running fsck (implemented on the Telnet menu as fixdisk): run it as soon as there is any suspicion, because if left too late it won't be able to correct all the inconsistencies.
Click to expand...
 
OK... bit the bullet!!! What prompted action was glitches while simultaneously recording and playing back something else last night. Clearly not a transient problem or transmitter trouble or something.

Opening the box and getting the drive out... yes, OK, it was easy! Only squeaky bum moment was when I dropped a screw and it rolled under the PCB (Retrieved!) Was a bit surprised to pull out a 1TB drive (a Seagate "Pipeline HD .2")... I'd remembered it as 2TB but it's been so long since it's had more than 100MByte free I'd forgotten how big it was originally.

Plugged it and the replacement drive onto a desktop's SATA ports and power (no niceties putting it in a drive bay or cradle)...
humax.jpg
...and cloned it drive-to-drive with ddrescue (after a sniff at the partitions with gparted). Looked like it was going to take 2-3 hours but then it hit some bad sectors and by the time it had repeatedly tried those it was around 5 hours until it was done. Output showed 23 "bad areas" all on one part of the disk, but basically 100% copied.

Then I hit the cloned partitions with fsck with the -y accept all option, which did a spew of stuff on the big partition (maybe took another hour) and didn't seem to find any trouble with the others.

Stuck it back in the Hummy and it seems to be working great. New disk sounds a bit "different" somehow, but it's not obviously louder than the old one; have to turn the volume right down to hear it. I think the Hitachi drives always had a good reputation for quietness though. I suppose the main issue is whether it can cope with continuous streaming as well as a PVR/CCTV disk; just recording something now so will discover the answer to that soon enough. We don't bother with HD though (last few retunes I haven't even bothered to tune in the HD signal)... and hopefully just SD streams are less demanding to sink to disk.

Going to try and resist - for now - the temptation to take the drive out again and mess around with partitions to use the unused half on the new drive.... with the most of the 1TB on the box full - and another 1TB external USB drive attached and pretty full - the last thing I need is more space to record more stuff I'll probably never get around to watching.
 
WTF didn't you just run fixdisk? I give up. You can lead a horse to water... (or in this case an ass).
 
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Owen Smith said:
I agree with BlackHole, because you haven't used the second half of your new disk you're in exactly the same situation as you would have been if you'd run fixdisk.
Click to expand...
But ddrescue's detection of some bad sectors proves the old disk was dying, and now I have a (hopefully) healthy "new" disk. So the failing HW issue is resolved. But yes, I am in exactly the same position capacity-wise when I could have more... but that's not a big deal and not the issue which needed a quick fix.

Having now violated my Hummy's "as it came from the factory" purity... sticking the custom firmware on it is surely inevitable at some point before the year is out. (Although... so many projects, so little time....). Just been looking at https://wiki.hummy.tv/wiki/2TB_Disk_Installation_Blog which now looks a lot less intimidating than it would have done a few days ago.
 
Bad sectors does not imply imminent death, rapidly increasing numbers of bad sectors is a more ominous symptom.

Reallocation of bad sectors is a mechanism built into the disk hardware to allow it to continue to function despite there being some faulty spots and fixdisk is a fairly painless way of keeping the disk of of a humax in good shape without the need to swap disk.
 
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