Swapping HD from broken 4000t to a new one

[fatgingerbeard]

I have had a 4000t for just over 2 years and it died a week ago - local repairer said it was the main board. As I didn't want to lose my recordings, I bought a reconditioned 4000t and swapped the HDD. The problem now is that whilst I can see all of my old recordings in the list, none of them will play - I have tried both HD and SD recordings. I can make a new recording and that will play.

Is there anything I can do, or are my old recordings lost?

Thanks in advance for any help!

 

[Black Hole]

You have failed to appreciate a factor of Humax PVRs (and I think most PVRs in general, particularly if they are branded YouView or Freeview Play) that we have been going on about here for years: the recordings stored on internal HDD are encrypted (individually, or as a result of being on an encrypted file system).

Please see Things Every... (click) section 5 - this is written for HDR-FOX, but applies to you too. Note particularly bullet point 4.

In summary: without your original motherboard, you are stuffed.

 

[fatgingerbeard]

Not what I wanted to hear, but thanks for the clarification! I had wrongly assumed that transplanting the HDD into another unit of the same type would get round the encryption issues, but as you say I have failed to appreciate something crucial!

I do still have the original motherboard, but I guess a repair is likely to be uneconomical?

 

[Member 7823]

I guess you tried plugging your USB socket into a desktop which might let you copy across

 

[Black Hole]

I guess you tried plugging your USB socket into a desktop which might let you copy across

I don't understand how that would help. The recordings are protected by encryption, and the decryption key is unique to the unit that created them. If the encryption is on a file-by-file basis, copying the files simply duplicates the encrypted file with no means to decrypt it.

If the whole file system is encrypted, it won't be possible to even access the individual files without the OS having the relevant key.

I do still have the original motherboard, but I guess a repair is likely to be uneconomical?

Very probably, yes.

It's only telly - live with it.

 

[fatgingerbeard]

It's only telly - live with it.

Try telling that to my missus - there's a whole series of Poldark on there and it's only available on iPlayer until Tuesday!

 

[Black Hole]

It'll get repeated, or alternatively use a utility such as get-iplayer or youtube-dl to grab it on your PC.

However, what I find is that there is never nothing else on. If you haven't watched a recording in a couple of weeks, you probably never will.

 

[everthewatcher]

If you haven't watched a recording in a couple of weeks, you probably never will.

Seconded.

 

[prpr]

If you haven't watched a recording in a couple of weeks, you probably never will.

I've just watched some stuff from weeks/months/last year ago, as the stack of new stuff has been somewhat reduced recently (and I was short of disk space).

 

[sceptic]

Try telling that to my missus - there's a whole series of Poldark on there and it's only available on iPlayer until Tuesday!

I would also recommend get_iplayer and use it for all the stuff I would have previously recorded on the BBC channels. Download it on a PC and run the following command and the latest series of Poldark will be yours:-

get_iplayer --pid=b07pn8mz --pid-recursive