Replace dying drive or the whole box?

M

MrSoapsud

New Member
Hi,
I put a 2TB WD Green drive in some years ago but it's started to go sick. I'm wondering whether I should just replace the drive or whether it's time to buy a new box?
If the former, could I put a 3 TB drive in or is there a limit of 2? From what I've read WD green seems to be the best bet of what's available? (Point about the Purple ones noted).
If I were to buy a new box, what would it be? I see Humax don't do FreeSat any more and the Freesat/Arris box appears to have "teething trouble". I like managing recordings on the HDR via Raydon's web interface and also pull recordings over my network to watch on PCs. Should I just stick with what I have??
Thanks
Martin
 
MrSoapsud said:
Should I just stick with what I have??
Click to expand...
Probably, yes. It will be a case of better the devil you know.

If the faults are all indicative of the HDD rather than anything else, replace the HDD. If not, source a second hand FOXSAT-HDR.

MrSoapsud said:
could I put a 3 TB drive in or is there a limit of 2?
Click to expand...
There is a fundamental limit of 2TiB when limited to MBR. In HDR-FOX-land, custom firmware has allowed for GPT drives (with no practical size limit), but I don't think that is a possibility with the limited resources of the FOXSAT-HDR.

More info (specifically for HDR-FOX, but applies in general): Things Every... (click) section 12.
 
Thanks for that. The symptoms I'm seeing are that it locked up recording something yesterday evening after successfully recording something earlier.
I managed to get it into Maintenance mode and run fix-disk this morning and it found some errors.
As per one bit of advice on the interweb I've renamed the 0.ts/0.nts files in case they were sitting on the bad bit.
It will now boot and run for a while and appears to be ok. But after a few minutes, the video freezes although the audio carries on for a while. Then I might lose the network connection and after a few more minutes it reboots itself. After it reboots it's ok again for a while before repeating the sequence...
I was playing around with some of the freesat/non-freesat channel numbers on Saturday but it recorded several things after that and I can't see that causing these problems.
Any thoughts on a diagnosys?
Thanks
Martin
 
MrSoapsud said:
Any thoughts on a diagnosys?
Click to expand...
Doesn't sound good.

PSU is a prime suspect. Typically the capacitors "dry out" so the PSU goes out-of-spec (or doesn't work at all). Electrolytic capacitors look like miniature baked bean cans, an aluminium can with a plastic sleeve. The end should be flat, and can be seen to be bulging when the capacitor has gone off. Replacing them can make the PSU work again, and kits are available for common consumer devices (I once fixed a Panasonic DVD-R recorder).

It might be instructive to disconnect the HDD and see what happens. The Foxsat will still work as a receiver without an HDD. If it continues to play up, you know it's not the HDD (but not vice versa - if it stops misbehaving it could still be the PSU, just that the reduced load has potentially allowed the PSU to keep working).

If you don't fancy all that fiddling around, just get a replacement. Once you have verified a replacement to be working, you can test the HDD in it.
 
Black Hole said:
PSU is a prime suspect. Typically the capacitors "dry out" so the PSU goes out-of-spec (or doesn't work at all). Electrolytic capacitors look like miniature baked bean cans, an aluminium can with a plastic sleeve. The end should be flat, and can be seen to be bulging when the capacitor has gone off. Replacing them can make the PSU work again, and kits are available for common consumer devices (I once fixed a Panasonic DVD-R recorder).

It might be instructive to disconnect the HDD and see what happens. The Foxsat will still work as a receiver without an HDD. If it continues to play up, you know it's not the HDD (but not vice versa - if it stops misbehaving it could still be the PSU, just that the reduced load has potentially allowed the PSU to keep working).
Click to expand...
I think you might have something there. I tried it for a while this morning without the network cable plugged in and it was fine. I then restarted it with a network cable and it was ok for a bit until I tried doing some stuff over the network and then it did as above. I replaced a set of capacitors which had "put on weight" in a 1980's record deck a few months ago but they were a different shape. I've just pulled the lid off the HDR and see the caps you describe but they don't look mis-shaped...
Does that help?
 
MrSoapsud said:
I tried it for a while this morning without the network cable plugged in and it was fine
Click to expand...
Right, that takes us down a completely different path. The Humax network stack (the combination of services running in software and hardware which provide networking) is notoriously bad in the HDR-FOX, working fine under the right circumstances but crashing when errors occur in the network traffic (because those execution paths through the software are not accounted for or were not tested properly).

One prime suspect (for HDR-FOX) would be a DLNA conflict on the home network, but IIRC the FOXSAT has no DLNA server.

The following is written for HDR-FOX, but it might give you some ideas: Steps for Resolving HDR-FOX Crash/Reboot Issues (click).
 
Black Hole said:
One prime suspect (for HDR-FOX) would be a DLNA conflict on the home network, but IIRC the FOXSAT has no DLNA server.
Click to expand...
There's MediaTomb, TwonkyMedia 4 and TwonkyMedia 5 for the Foxsat-HDR (packages mediatomb, twonky4 and twonky5), did you install any of those?

A friend is selling my three Foxsat-HDRs (two with 1TB, one with 320GB HDD) on eBay soon as I'm leaving the contry owing to Brexit.
 
MofTot said:
There's MediaTomb, TwonkyMedia 4 and TwonkyMedia 5 for the Foxsat-HDR (packages mediatomb, twonky4 and twonky5), did you install any of those?
Click to expand...
Took the lid off the Foxsat and put a multimedia on the jumper taking the DC off the PSU board and the voltages looked right.
I did have twonky4 on the box but never really made use of it so I've removed it.
I also realised I had a Fire Stick with a wired network interface plugged into the same Devolo LAN box. The Fire Stick mains adapter was plugged into a 4-way extension which I've had some problems with before so I've plugged that in somewhere else and will progress the testing....
Thanks both.
 
Don't inconvenience yourself by ditching something you use. The DLNA issue with HDR-FOX was just illustrative - I can't imagine the CF DLNA servers would suffer the same problem. Nonetheless, some kind of network interaction appears to be at the root of your problem (but correlation is not proof of causation).
 
I never got the hang of Twonky so it's no loss. I mostly just copy files over the network if I want to watch something on a PC.
I think it's more likely that the interaction with the Fire Stick which shared a network switch but was in a dodgy 4-way socket was the most likely - the Fire Stick was playing up last night too.
Thanks for reading my rambles and making really helpful suggestions. Since I did the changes earlier it's been running for hours quite happily. Your prompting has saved my buying a new hard drive, a capacitor set and/or a 2nd hand HDR!
Cheers
Martin
 
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