Try phoning them. They seem better at answering the phone than they are at responding to emails. I'm not sure they will be much help though. They'll probably just sugest trying resetting to factory defaults.

I believe whats happening here is that you are overwriting some of your recordings and then deleting them when you delete the new recording, people have had limited success recovering some recordings by recording a program from the same channel for a minute. When they watch it back a lost program appears after that 1 minute.

Neil

well since loosing all my recordings my humax has been very odd - one recording returned, using the buffer as chase play caused it to lock up pretty much everytime, then splitting a recording meant i couldn't watch the second section - it just came up with a message saying it was scrambled, (I'd backed up onto VHS already - I don't have DVDR yet), so, I have done it, re-formatted and given up on humax's "recovery tool" that will either never happen - or sods law be released next week. It seems more stable so far!!!
I was surprised that a re-format didn't erase my recording schedule list!

I am managing at the moment without reformatting. There's very little on at present that I want to watch.
This thread has gone very quiet now. Is there no news of any sort?

Its what happens when the POS bolts 2 different recordings together, the 2nd will usually be something you deleted long ago and its joined because your new recording overwrote the start of it and the filesystem is very confused. Its not actually scrambled, just has different stream PIDs.

You can usually recover the contents by copying to PC and cutting in ProjectX. You *may* be able to split the file and get part2 back but it usually causes even more damage to the files.

The usual suggestion to recover lost recordings needs you to use the same channel to get matching PIDs in the new & old part. If you use ProjectX and manually set PIDs you can avoid that requirement and use any channel.

When I ran my machine without a hard disk I found it was saving the scheduling info somewhere else like rom when in standby. Only way to flush it is for a factory reset or to delete them manually from the list.

Hi,
I have Bodies available if you want a copy.....
mail me at dg1002@hotmail.com and perhaps we can come to a mutual arrangement.

I've lost 3 weeks worth of unwatched recordings totalling 98 separate programs (Bleak House, Little Britain, Peep Show, Rome, final episode of Bodies to name but a few).

This is for your fusion is this right?

B*gger. We've just lost 29GB of unwatched recordings. OH has lost all faith in the Humax, with this happening after no sound recordings, lock-ups and problems with audio drop-outs. I can't say I blame her. I really like the Humax, but this leaves us with no confidence that we will be able to watch what we record which rather defeats the purpose of having a recorder. I'll call Humax on Monday to see what they have to say.

what happened prior to this lost of recordings? had it locked or anything?

No lock, no nothing. We'd been out for the evening but had watched a recorded programme earlier in the day. We came back in, switched out of standby and went to watch another recorded programme but the cupboard was bare.

The only thing I think we might have done differently to normal was that we checked the weather forecast on teletext before leaving and I think I switched the 9200 to standby whilst still in text mode.

A little good news. The 'one minute recording' trick has allowed us to recover four programmes we especially wanted to see. Not a lot out of 29GB, but better than nothing. I'll format the HD after watching them.

It does rather suggest though, that some form of recovery utility should not be too difficult to engineer if Humax were to consider it a reasonable priority. If we can recover some programmes with no real access to the data on the drive, a machine level file recovery utility should be a piece of p*ss. Am I missing something?

Your probably right although i suspect they are focussed on fixing the problem for the time being, a recovery tool is not a solution and if they fix the bug then they would probably see it as not being worth the effort to write one for the people affected. It probably makes more sense for them to say sorry it happened, here is an update, it won't happen again.

That would make more sense if they did that, but given that this thread started 5 months ago and we appear to be no closer to a solution, a couple of days work by a competent engineer, cobbling together a recovery utility might seem a reasonable option.

In most industries, the first level fix to a problem is normally containment, followed by prevention which generally takes longer. A quick and dirty recovery utility would seem areasonable containment action in this context.

I was suggesting this months ago. If I were a Humax software engineer with documentation of the file structure I would feel so guilty about people losing all their recordings I would spend a weekend knocking up such a utility out of the goodness of my heart. They just don't seem to care.

I just spoke with Humax technical support. They claim that there will be a recovery utility and a fix, but they can't say when. They also claim that no-one has suffered this fault twice (?) so I should feel safe that it shouldn't happen again (!). I can't see that the statistics on this stack up, but I'm curious now. Has anyone lost all their recordings more than once?

Yes, I'm sorry to say, and if they bothered to read their emails they wouldn't be claiming otherwise. They've been saying there will be a recovery utility for a while now - don't hold your breath.

Yes, its a lie and yes I reported it. I've had it 3 times (and reformatted a few times when the filesystem went weird), though the 1st was self inflicted while I was experimenting with uploads on the 1st day, so I don't count it.

But 2 spontaneous wipeouts *so far*. Probably won't have another because I barely use it, just backup when my PC can't get everything.

For what it's worth, I lost about 60 recordings when the box was about a month old. Ididn't realise that it had happened until about a week later, by which time I had more unwatched programmes stacked up. So I've just soldiered on since with half the disk unavailable. Yesterday I had seventy-odd programmes recorded and half-way through a recording got a message that the recording would stop due to lack of space. As I was actually watching it at the time I clicked OK, only to find later that the whole prog had recorded OK. I wonder if I'd carried on recording whether eventually the "lost" space would be reclaimed. I didn't risk it though, and freed up some more space, but I haven't lost anything a second time.

Thanks all for the feedback. As we have very little on the HD at the moment (just a couple of things recorded since the crash), I aim to format the HD at some point this week and see how things go. If there's no sign of a firmware update in the next couple of months, I'll consider returning the box as 'not fit for purpose' and see what other PVR options are available. I really like the Humax, but without a fix for this issue, I fear we will never be able to rely on it not to lose everything again and that isn't a practical proposition.

There's a report that support have promised an update for this bug this month (May). http://www.radioandtelly.co.uk/cgi-b...43569874/15#21

My advice is: don't wait months, if there's no update by June 1 dump it then. The sad truth is Humax have been leaking news of a fix (the mythical recovery tool) for 6 months now with no action, you should be highly skeptical of yet another leaked promise. Remember, this is a company that told you the bug couldn't happen twice despite not knowing what causes it (so how could they know) and knowing it *had happened to at least 1 user*.

(And if Humax believe they know what causes the problem enough to make the 'never twice' claim then clearer they don't really have a fix because the don't really understand the problem)

I love the way your (not so) balanced view takes the word "Shouldn't" and magically turns it into "couldn't"

Maybe if you are the only person to report a loss of all recordings twice, Humax took your report with the same pinch of salt I take reading any of your posts.

or the report wasn't properly communicated through the company (poor performance, I agree), either way your interpretation of the original post is your usual level of elevated negativity.

I too wouldn't trust the machine to not fail a second time but there are more balanced ways of presenting this advice.

Last time I updated this thread with inside info close to the work Korea were doing on this there were some successes at last and work was going ahead with pursuing the cure. The fix for the lost recordings table has has been tested and has been working. I think Humax would like a lot more time on this but seeing as the results so far have been so positive and the problem a very horrible one to ever experience, they think it should be included at the earliest possible release - which is the ITV/Channel 4 type channels lockups software for some time this month. When they get to the stage where the software package can be released they will book an OTA slot too and this currently looks like beginning of June. If anything changes and I learn about it I will absolutely try to keep the forum up to date.

I realise its difficult to for the helpdesk to keep abrest of changing information and normally just give out the last information they had heard about but I think its only realistic that they will advice customers that Humax are working on a fix or a tool until they find out otherwise. Paul Shirley seems to want to make people think he knows what is actualy happening but if I were any of you I wouldnt place my faith in what he is trying to tell you.

I've just realised that If I add up all the recordings listed, I come about 50GB short of what the hummy tells me is the total on the machine(although I've never lost all my recordings, I have had some fail to show up in teh recorded list which I just assumed had failed to record)
.As this seems to be related to the lost recodings bug, I wondered if anyone could tell me
a) does this mean I am likely to lose all my recording soon?
b) can the phantom space be cleared using elinker in some way?
c) Can I just keep recording beyond where the hummy would normally think it was full?

I dont know but I must say have wondered for a while about those things like the recordings that appear to be taking place but dont appear in the playlist etc for example the old radio recordings bug in standby. If it is recording and not showing up on the playlist but taking up space who knows what risk this is causing? I've done a lot of tests with failed recordings to the point where I was replicating quite a lot of them. NBever had a lost recordings problem but recently wondered about how much risk I might have placed my machine under.

I dont think the space can be easily cleared up at all without a format.

According to one report aparantly you get a message when you come up to the limit but then it lets you record anyway because its like phantom used space dnwilson.