Took the hard drive out of my Humax HDR today to test a USB HDD caddy was working. All I did was connect the drive up to the caddy and made sure it switched on, which it did.

Switched it back off and returned the hard drive to the Humax, but now it's saying it needs to format the disk!

I don't understand why that would be as nothing has been done to the disk regarding it's contents. Now I've had to take the disk drive out again to get past the format option and be able to watch tv on the box.

Anyone know why it's asking for a format or whether I can get it working again. I have a fair few programmes recorded that I don't want to have to wipe off.

You`ve probably overwritten the MBR (master boot record) of the drive. The Foxsat uses a different file system to a pc so putting the drive into a puter has probably caused the mbr to be overwritten or corrupted.
Just bite the bullet and let the foxsat re-format the drive.

That's the thing though. The drive was NEVER put in a PC or even attached to one so the MBR couldn't have been written over.

It was simply attached to a usb caddy which was switched on to test that it powered the drive up. The caddy was standalone so apart from the disk spinning up nothing could have been overwritten.

Managed to get hold of a small 160gb sata drive and installed that in the Humax. Allowed the box to format the disk and then switched box off again.

Reinstalled the 500Gb drive and this time it booted straight into a tv channel without asking to format. All recordings still intact. Phew.

Very strange though, and I wont be taking the drive out again in a hurry.