I happened to have a spare 500MB drive so I swapped them, successfully.
Just any 500GB* drive, or a drive suited to PVR (rather than PC) use? If not, "successfully" remains to be seen.
* I hope you mean "GB" – 500MB is enough for about half an hour's recording time!
I'd dearly love to recover a number of recordings.
Be aware that even if you manage to recover the recording files, they are encrypted and only of use if you put them back in the original machine (exactly how you do that is another matter).
To expand on
prpr's reply above, there are three levels of failure or corruption which may affect an operating system's interaction with an HDD:
Physical failure. There's nothing a non-specialist can do about that; recovery labs can dismantle a HDD and transplant the magnetic platters into reader hardware... at a cost.
Surface defects. Modern HDDs expect a proportion of manufacturing defects, and have built-in mechanisms to bypass them by mapping them out. The operating system carries on unaffected. To some extent, defects which accumulate in use also get mapped out (until there are too many). However, sometimes the HDD needs taking off-line and a "deep clean" carried out, which might be sufficient to restore functionality with no or little loss of data.
We can do this using the HDR-FOX custom firmware (and monitor the HDD's state of health), but there is no such option for HDR-2000T and can only be performed by connecting the HDD to a "proper" computer.
File system defects. File systems (NTFS, FAT32, exFAT...) are databases. Information is stored on a disk drive in blocks, and which block any particular information is stored in has to be tracked by index tables (which are also "information"). If any particular item of information is to big to be accommodated in one block, it has to be split across multiple blocks, and each block could be anywhere on the disk according to which blocks were free at the time...
The critical element of the file system is the indexing. If a corruption occurs, due to a glitch, a write failure if the PC/PVR got turned off unexpectedly, software error, uncorrectable HDD defect, whatever, the database may lose track of where information is stored – and then the information is effectively lost. How robust a file system is depends on how much redundant indexing is stored so that faults can be detected and bypassed. As with HDD defects, some level of faults may be tolerated and the system carries on regardless, but ultimately a deep clean is required. For simplicity, the only "deep clean" typically offered in consumer devices is to reformat the HDD and start again (with loss of all existing data).
Humax PVRs do not use Windows-compatible file systems. Ext3 is a common file system in the Linux world, and is fairly robust. The likes of HDR-FOX uses a stripped-down Linux as its OS, and HDR-2000T probably does too. If you try hacking Ext3 using Windows, it will probably end in tears.
By connecting the HDD to a system running Linux, you will have access to file system scanning and repair tools, and also tools to trigger the HDD's internal self-repair process. Depending how "locked down" your Windows PC is, you should be able to download a version of Linux and prepare a USB drive as bootable. You may need to alter the PC's BIOS settings to boot from USB. You can then use Linux without affecting the PC's Windows installation.
GParted Live is a good one for HDD recovery.
On the other hand, and considering the encryption, you might decide it's all too much trouble and "it's only telly". There will be more along in a minute, and most things get repeated if you wait long enough.
