Finally found a shop with one in stock, and have it waiting to be plugged in pending final days of Sky contract.

Going to take the 500gb hard drive I put in my Sky+ box, put it in an external caddy and use it as backup space attached to the usb port on the back of the humax.

So,

1/ I have read that the humax will only handle large files if the box is formatted to linuxs ext3. No problem with this, but would like to be able to watch stuff via PC as and when. Is there a simple way to get windows (xp) to recognise this filing system?

2/ If I can get windows to read ext3, or even if I can't and have to use fat32, does the external drive appear as a visible drive for PCs to access if I connect the humax up to my network?

Looking forward to getting it set up, just waiting for my missus to catch up with all the gubbins she's got recorded on the sky+.

1 correct file limit for faT32 IS 4gB, for SD recordings that's adequate for all but the longest films. HD obviously uses a lot more but HD programmes recorded in freesat mode are encrypted and can't be copied to the external drive. There are drivers available for windows for EXT3 but there is a snag, all the ones I have tried require that the drive is properly unloaded before it will work. The Foxsat does not have any way of unloading the drive so to use on a PC you need to boot a PC into Linux, once you have done this it's just as easy to copy large files to a ntfs partition.

2 The ethernet port is not yet implemented so no one knows what if any access to the stb will be provided. The only think that seems certain is BBC iplayer support.

Incidentally VLC media player will play the .ts files from the foxsat

According to this thread: http://www.hummy.org.uk/forums/showthread.php?t=5383

The Ext2Fsd drivers can cope with this problem... I have not tried this so need confirmation...

I'm using the Ext2Fsd drivers and can confirm it does work with "Dirty" drives.

Nice Thanks for the confirmation.

Brill thanks.