Does anyone know if it’s possible to buy a Freesat box without the HDD? I’ve an existing box which decided it didn’t want to acknowledge the existence of its 1TB drive some time back, and today it seems to have finally turned up its toes.
I suppose a replacement main circuit board would serve me just as well, but I’ve never found anywhere to get one.
I’m just being parsimonious I suppose, but it seems daft to pay for another HDD when the one I have works fine.
eBay?
You can by the Manhattan TV barebones Freesat receivers for £50 on Amazon.
I have two of them in gites and they do exactly what it says on the tin though cold boot time is noticeably longer than my Humax box.
I got the impression @Freemp31 wanted to buy a Freesat decoder that supported a hard drive, but without a hard drive, and then attach the hard drive from his old decoder.
Generally this would entail buying the same model with a non-working hard drive so about the only possibility is eBay (other auction sites are available).
Even where there is a base model in some product line which does not support a hard drive and an up market model which does it is generally not possible to buy the base model and simply add a hard drive - almost certainly there will be extra components which are not included on the base model, even if it is the same circuit board.
1 Like
You’re assuming it works well Paul, maybe it was the cause of failure. You probably never used the full 1TB capacity (256 full HD DVDS?) anyway so a nice cheap box that takes an SD card or a USB key would be my advice. If they turn out to be too small it’s easy to swap ‘em out.
That was my thought as well - though there usually isn’t anything too magic about the drives. They might have a propitiatory partition table or file system but generally I’d expect that you could put them into a computer to check them out (ideally Linux or some other OS which doesn’t freak when presented with an odd hard drive).
1 Like
The Humax Freesat box suffers from a very well known issue where the HDD is suddenly not seen. It’s an issue with the box and not the HDD. 999 times out of 1000, the HDD is perfectly fine. I have a Humax Freesat box, and fingers crossed, it hasn’t happened to mine yet.
Edit : The filing system is luks encrypted, and so won’t be readable on another machine. In saying that, some reports suggest that after a certain software release, a reformat would create a fs in the clear, so your milage may vary.
Which is fair enough - but it doesn’t solve @Freemp31’s problem of buying a decoder without a hard drive into which he can plug his.
Mind you since Prime/Netflix and “catch up” on iPlayer etc was a thing I haven’t used our HDD freeview box to record any programmes - and the HDD attached to the TV is only ever used for the “pause live TV” function.
He could also get a Humax HB1000S or HB1100S. It’s single tuner rather than dual, but with a sata/usb convertor it will record and playback using his existing drive via the USB port on the back. Not sure how easy they are to get online now.
Hi
There is a company in Northern Ireland that repairs Humax boxes, cost about £80 if no parts are required. We sent ours after it just stopped working and it was back in about two weeks. We had a lot of old programs that recorded that we wanted to keep so we’re happy to pay.
Regards
Nick
The drive from the (now) dead machine works fine in another Humax, and various other HDD’s presented to it were also not recognized.
I was happy enough to use it as a bedroom receiver with no drive, but now it’s apparently dead I thought - for the sake of completeness - I’d see how feasible it would be to get it fully working. The TV in that room has a sat input but only resolves the SD channels, which is odd because the DTT input is HD, as are the HDMIs of course. so as you can see this is the epitome of a middle class crisis - poor man can’t get to see Newsnight in HD as he’s drifting off to sleep!
1 Like
…the trouble with that is my non-techy partner who gives me GBH of the 'ear-hole if not presented with a UK-style Freesat EPG (1=BBC1, 2=BBC2 etc.).
Hi Paul,
yeap Humax make exactly that, I have one. A Humax HB-1100S then I plug in an external USB HDD.
I also have another Humax box with an internal HDD (HDR-1100S) but if I move the external HDD to this other Humax (the HDR) then I have to reformat the drive so you can only view the content from the device you used to record on (in my case the HB).
Ping me if you have any questions,
Rich
Two suggestions:
(1) Humax sat box without recording capacity? Yes. We have one. It’s called FOXSAT-HD. (ours is not for sale - it cost €15 secondhand 5yrs ago)
(2) There is a forum for all Humax questions and a guy called Graham Thompson knows everything there is to know. Free to join, ask question - but I bet your query has already been asked and answered before.