Second Hand Prices

Big ups to the person who figured out the hdf upgrade & package mods, guess to them cloning partitions isn't complicated

Which is the very reason I added about Clone Partition is my 1st working go when upgrade from 500Gb to 1TB. Purely because the Commodore 64 approach of Portal Maintenance mode seemed a bit archaic, but if the well established only way to go for HD bigger then 2TB, maybe the reason why many here are so protective over formatting a drive? Surely this Forum is to help ppl to do it themselves, why try to overcomplicate a simple process?
And this is relevant to this thread how? Time to clip his wings.
 
Should have added that RF input/output horizontal and not vertical. Disk hours 23218, 74% remaining. See my post in CFW on disk diagnostics key for full details.
 
I paid £47 in October for a HDR (500GB) on ebay.
I'm guessing it's an older version than my first one (my first was bought new in 2013, just before the 2000T replaced the T2) - it has horizontally arranged aerial connections rather than vertical.
Works fine, though the fan didn't work, and that wasn't a fan problem - the mainboard just wasn't supplying power even when it thought it was - running the fan constantly on 5V from the rear USB port seems to keep things at an acceptable temperature.
Hard disk (original, I think) is only showing 4606 hours, so I guess it didn't get used much.
 
I installed the CF as soon as I got the unit, and the temperature monitor showed that the temperature kept going up, and when I looked, the fan wasn't running even though it obviously should have been, and the CF thought it was.
I'd been wary about the unit as it had obviously had a smack at some point - the aerial connections were coming out at an angle rather than perpendicularly - so I was giving it a good checking out to make sure it worked.

I'm glad I tested the fan before replacing it - it would have been mildly annoying to buy another (like I had to do a while ago on my primary HDR) and find it didn't work either.
I hadn't read the info linked to in #25, and didn't know that working fan/dead driver was a common enough thing to deserve mentioning - not something I've come across before on other hardware, and I've changed quite a few fans in my time.
I just connected the fan to the rear USB port using a bodge from an old USB cable and bits from my parts box, and that seems to provide adequate cooling, as well as being pretty quiet.

I'm tempted to do something similar with my primary unit, as the fan in that doesn't seem to behave properly even with the fan package installed - seems to heat up with no fan until the fan comes on full blast, even though it's supposed to be running at a background level all the time - maybe a partial driver failure?
That primary HDR (late model) seems also to have an issue with remote reboots via the web interface - they never work, always leaving it in a state where it can't receive transmissions without manually rebooting.
Maybe some subtle difference between hardware versions?
 
For information:

the fan wasn't running even though it obviously should have been, and the CF thought it was.
The CF doesn't and can't know whether the fan is actually running, what it reports is the expected behaviour under the circumstances of temperature read from the HDD SMART stats (which we have deduced is how the Humax firmware does it).

didn't know that working fan/dead driver was a common enough thing to deserve mentioning
I don't know how common it is - as an engineer I was just being thorough.

That primary HDR (late model) seems also to have an issue with remote reboots via the web interface - they never work, always leaving it in a state where it can't receive transmissions without manually rebooting.
There is a known issue that if the unit is in a particular state (I don't remember what, exactly), a software reset is unsuccessful. Software resets used to be accompanied by a warning about this. Are you running latest CF?
 
I'm tempted to do something similar with my primary unit, as the fan in that doesn't seem to behave properly even with the fan package installed - seems to heat up with no fan until the fan comes on full blast, even though it's supposed to be running at a background level all the time - maybe a partial driver failure?
I would have thought it more likely that you need to run the fixflash diagnostic.
 
The CF doesn't and can't know whether the fan is actually running, what it reports is the expected behaviour under the circumstances of temperature read from the HDD SMART stats (which we have deduced is how the Humax firmware does it).
I can't remember the precise details of what I did and when, but I'm pretty sure I had the fan package installed from scratch (at least, it's there now, with minimum speed set to 60%, and I don't imagine I would have installed it or changed settings after I switched the fan to power from the USB port), so I assume that fan was writing some variable/register to set or at least request a speed/fan voltage, even if the CF can't read what the speed is supposed to be.

I don't know how common it is - as an engineer I was just being thorough.
Well, it definitely happened to me, so +1 for thoroughness.
For what it's worth, running off USB/5V, the HDD temp seems to level off in the low 40s in a ~20C room, so not a bad alternative to hardwiring to 12V.

There is a known issue that if the unit is in a particular state (I don't remember what, exactly), a software reset is unsuccessful. Software resets used to be accompanied by a warning about this. Are you running latest CF?
The CF on that unit is slightly behind (3.10), but the software reboot has consistently not worked on that unit from the time I first installed the CF (2.20?) in 2013. Maybe there are states where it typically doesn't work on machines in general, but I suspect it's something more than that with this one. I'll try installing 3.13 and see if that makes a difference, though I guess the excellent real time scheduling function has made software rebooting much less important.
 
I would have thought it more likely that you need to run the fixflash diagnostic.
Many thanks for that - fixflash did sort things out on my original unit (where the fan wasn't responding to a minimum speed from the fan package but was working in the default way), but didn't make a difference to the one I'd recently bought where there was no fan at any temperature.

I guess for a firmware issue to have explained the second case, something (from a fresh install of the CF) would have to have been overriding the fan drive from the regular Humax firmware and making it not run even when it should have been. Maybe the non-running fan was why the unit was on ebay in the first place.
 
I assume that fan was writing some variable/register to set or at least request a speed/fan voltage, even if the CF can't read what the speed is supposed to be.
Yes

For what it's worth, running off USB/5V, the HDD temp seems to level off in the low 40s in a ~20C room, so not a bad alternative to hardwiring to 12V.
You're lucky a 12V fan will start up at 5V, I wouldn't have expected it to.
 
I have had five 12v fans of various makes running at 5v for several years with no problems. A quick check on two of these will just start at 3.5 volts.
 
So I've just picked up a "Very lightly used" box from Facebay for £40. Owner claimed it has been in a drawer for six years, and there were recordings of Masterchef from 2013, so that seems legit. HDD has POWER_ON_HRS = 3315.

Am I right to feel slightly smug?
 
Yes, jammy bugger :envy:
😁
Although, luckily, I installed the tempmon package from the outset, because it started complaining about being >54°C. After a little investigation, it looks like the fan driver has gone. Luckily, I could just transfer the HDD harness with the 12V hard-wired across from the old one. Odd that it has apparently failed on a unit with so little use, though.
 
😁
Although, luckily, I installed the tempmon package from the outset, because it started complaining about being >54°C. After a little investigation, it looks like the fan driver has gone. Luckily, I could just transfer the HDD harness with the 12V hard-wired across from the old one. Odd that it has apparently failed on a unit with so little use, though.
Humax default is not to turn the fan on at all until it reaches 55°C which is silly since that temp raises the flag in Smart data, many of us install the Fan package and run it continuously it around 50% too keep the disk temp in the 40s
 
Although, luckily, I installed the tempmon package from the outset, because it started complaining about being >54°C. After a little investigation, it looks like the fan driver has gone. Luckily, I could just transfer the HDD harness with the 12V hard-wired across from the old one. Odd that it has apparently failed on a unit with so little use, though.
I presume you mean sysmon.

Commissioning, Disassembling, and Repairing an HDR-FOX (click)
 
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