Good morning,
My 9015T of many years without any trouble has suddenly gone mad.Although all the settings and icons say that recordings are in progress.only the odd recording is made.There is plenty of disc space and no conflicts,
Additionally,some of previous recordings have been hi-jacked.i.e. I have several recordings of Dad`s Army - when I try to play back I come across a truncated recording of say Inspecctor Morse which obviously will only last as long as the original recorded item.
As a further blow,some of the original recorded items have just disappeared off the playlist.
Is the dear old thing beyond redemption ? I`m thinking of upgrading to a FOX T2 in any case.

I assume you mean the 9150

If you dive into the menus and select Installation then Default Settings. This will return the box to the state it was in when you first plugged it in. It will wipe all channels, scheduled recordings and other user settings. Though it will not delete any existing recordings.

So it will go into first time set-up again and you will have to put back any recordings you have scheduled. But this might get it back under control again.

If that does not work you may have to format the hard drive. Unfortunately this will lose all existing recordings but if the disk file system is corrupt (as it may well be) then it is your only real option. You get to the Format option off the Record menu HDD Control option.

If you can find a Fox-T2 then go for it. It is being replaced by the 2000T which from all I've read is not quite as good as the Fox-T2. I did exactly the same as you are proposing, started out with a 9150 and moved up to a Fox-T2 and have no cause to complain. And of course the Fox-T2 lets you view and record the HD channels the 9150 can't receive.

Thankyou.I had already tried the default option to no avail.Will now go for the format and see what happens.Maybe a silly question,but do I have to have a HDD TV to get the full advantages of a Fox T2 ?

Yes you need a HD TV to get the full benefit of the HD channels the Fox T2 can receive. It does however downscale HD channels to SD so you can connect to a non-HD TV via SCART.

Obviously you won't be getting HD over SCART but you will get a somewhat improved picture compared to the equivalent SD channel.

But what TV do you have? The vast majority of LCD type TVs sold over the past few years have HD display panels, even if they cannot receive the Freeview HD channels.And as long as there is at least one HDMI socket on the back you'll be able to watch HD from the Fox-T2 in HD on the telly. Unless you sit so far away that it is impossible to see the HD effect.

I have a Sony Bravia 32in Wide Screen HD ready LCD.I`m not very TV literate,but I understand it has 3 HDMI sockets.I bought it 5 years ago and apparently it is still on the market.The FOX 2T appears to be readily available and I`m leaning strongly to that route.(as I have all the Bethoven symphonies from the 2012 Proms recorded I am reluctant to do a format ! )Presumably the format operation is not guaranteed to rectify the problem ?

Well you will certainly benefit from a Fox-T2 to some extent. It depends on how close you sit to the telly. To see the full effect of HD you need to sit closer then you would for SD. For a 32in TV that could be under 6ft. Beyond that it becomes more difficult to distinguish the extra detail in a HD picture. But even so you can often see some difference.

From re-reading the first post it does sound like the disk file system has become corrupted. In that case a re-format might well sort it, at the expense of your existing recordings of course. Mind you if the disk is corrupt you very likely won't be able to play them anyway so are you any better off leaving it? Even if they play now there is no guarantee they will continue to do so.

If they do play OK and you can beg steal or borrow a DVD Recorder that may be one option to copy the recordings to disk. Trying to copy the recordings from the 9150 to the Fox-T2 may be a technical challenge at the very least.

Depends how comfortable you are tinkering with computers.
It is possible to attach the PVR9150's SATA HDD to a computer via either a USB/SATA adapter or directly in the case of a desktop (obviously means opening the PVR and removing the HDD).

There is a utility that runs in Windows that can recover the Humax HDD from this corruption without the reformat.

Alternatively free software can "extract" the recordings from it, to be played back on a PC or network media streamer, or converted digitally to DVD (via a PC DVD writer), or even adapted to allow playback on a Humax HDR Fox-T2 (on internal or external HDD).

If you are interested I'll post links to where this has been discussed before.

Sometimes it can be a corrupt recording. But as finding it well that's the problem. My girlfriends 9150 after a few year's had problem not recording and deleting some programmes at random solved it.
Last edited by Prilicla : 03-06-2014 at 21:32

Thankyou for this.As a near nonagenerian,my computer literacy is somewhat limited so I don`t think I had better take up your suggestions ! However my whizz kid son is coming to visit shortly and he will know what to do.So please send the links.
I have now decided to relegate the 9150 to the reserve and go for a FoxHDR 2T from Humax Direct.I think this will suit my requirements and its sell by date will probably exceed mine !

Thankyou Chrisp,you`ve been most helpful.You can see in another post that I am going for the Fox HDR - I may come back for help on installation !

The Wiki entries for the relevant PC programs for Humax HDD access/repair contain the most concise/complete usage information
HumaxRW Wiki
and
HumaxCheck Wiki

Anyone with experience of early PC use (DOS command line) and PC upgrading will be competent to follow them.

Note I may have been mistaken about the ability of the utilities to recover from Recording List Corruption, but the recovery of recordings is facilitated, along with returning recordings after using the PVR to reformat the HDD.