Large external drives

danco

Member
Can the HDR Fox T2 use a 3TB external drive? I have such a drive (formatted NTFS) that shows up ok on my Mac, so presumably the drive and cable are ok. But the Fox does not even see the drive.

The information I have found so far indicates that this drive must use GUID partition table, not MBR, and that the Fox cannot understand this. But I am wondering if I am missing anything that would let me use it. I do have the custom firmware.
 
Yes, I had read that before posting, but it really does not relate to the specific issue. There is a mention that "up to 2TB is possible if preformatted", which implies, but does not say explicitly, that 3TB drives can't be used. Considering that the article is over a year old, I felt it was well worth enquiring again in case there had been any developments.
 
The Humax won't work with that disk as the kernel is not compiled with GUID/EFI support. Even if that support were enabled, which it could be, it is unlikely to work because the version of Linux in use doesn't support GUID partition tables on 4K sector disks properly.
A full fix would involve backporting the fix for the last issue from a later kernel version.

This is actually on my todo list (I want to try and get a 3TB internal drive working) so my box is currently running a custom kernel with GUID/EFI and large block device support enabled but I have not yet addressed the 4K sector issue.
 
If you're interested, you could try my custom kernel with EFI support - it might see your 3TB disk.

http://hpkg.tv/fwx/HDR_kernels.zip

That contains two HDF files - one which will install the custom kernel and one which will revert to the stock one. Put the relevant file onto a USB stick as HDR_FOX_T2_upgrade.hdf and follow the usual firmware upgrade process.
 
Thanks. I'll try it. I had expected/hoped that some clever person would have worked out a solution like yours.
 
I installed it ok. I had hoped that it would work with an NTFS disk (of course I have the custom firmware NTFS module) but it seems not to.

And my understanding of Linux is limited, so I could not get my drive to format as Ext3. I tried using Ubuntu, both in a virtual machine on my Mac, and running in trial mode from a DVD, but could not see anything happening. I also tried Paragon's driver for the Mac, which seemed to get stuck for so long that I gave up.

I've probably got at least a year before my Fox drive is so full that I am forced to pull things off. It's only then that using an external drive larger than 2TB would become essential.
 
I've probably got at least a year before my Fox drive is so full that I am forced to pull things off. It's only then that using an external drive larger than 2TB would become essential.


Or alternatively get yourself a NAS so you are no longer restricted to 2TB and you can also benefit from some RAID protection too...
 
Once you plug the drive in, the dmesg command from the Humax command line might provide some useful information. I need to get myself a 3TB drive at some point to work on this properly.
 
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