Thomson HD to Amstrad DRX890

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Thomson HD to Amstrad DRX890

Postby kissinuk » Tue Nov 15, 2011 12:10 am

Hi,
The power supply on my Thomson started to go so before the engineer arrived I backed up the drive with Copy+. I have just done the following:-

Got a new Amstrad DRX890
Deleted partition
Used Copy+ to restore image to drive from Amstrad (no errors)

All good so far but when I start the Amstrad the planner is empty, even after a rebuild. Any ideas? The engineer upgraded to the latest Sky software while he was here.
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Re: Thomson HD to Amstrad DRX890

Postby tpogculture » Thu Nov 17, 2011 2:45 pm

I have exactly the same problem,

Copied content from my Sky+ Pace box to Image using copy+. Restored image to new 1.5Tb hard disk. Coverted to Big Endian. Plugged into DRX895 box and went to planner. I was then given blank planner. I did see a brief message saying that the Sky+ box was initializing. I believe it simply wiped the disk and reformatted it as blank instead of doing the once only conversion from pre-Darwin to Darwin.

Frustrating thing is I now have a brand new HD Sky box that I will have to delay using until we watch the 500GB or so content on the Sky Plus box!

Additionally this is my second DRX895. The first one I got about three months ago. I followed exactly the same procedure as above and it worked fine. The image was converted and never looked back.

Does anyone know if something has changed in the Sky Firmware and this is now the default behaviour OR have I done something wrong (hope so!).

Cheers.
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Re: Thomson HD to Amstrad DRX890

Postby tpogculture » Thu Nov 17, 2011 5:32 pm

As a follow up I have found some posts on another forum that mention that taking an image from a Sky+ box (non-hd) and writting to a new HD for a Darwin HD box will not work. The box will not perform the once-only pre-Darwin to Darwin conversion on an image from a Sky+ box.

A possible solution given for this is to use a pre-Darwin Thomson HD box as a kind of staged upgrade.

The process seems to be.

1. Take an image from the Sky+ Box (mine is a PACE)
2. Apply to a HD and place in a Thomson pre-Darwin HD Box (all Thomson HD boxes are pre-Darwin apparently).
3. On Power on the Thomson pre-Darwin HD Box should convert the Sky+ image for use in a pre-Darwin HD box
3. Image this Thomson HD drive
4. Apply to a HD for use in the new Darwin box (mine is a DRX895).
5. Power on DRX895 and it **should** perform the pre-Darwin HD to Darwin HD once only conversion.

Now I have no idea if any of this will work but I do have an old Thomson HD box so I am going to give it a try.

I will post results in a couple of days...going to take a while to get through all these images etc.

Cheers.
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Re: Thomson HD to Amstrad DRX890

Postby tpogculture » Sat Nov 19, 2011 1:10 pm

I'm happy to report back that the procedure above worked. It took a bit of time and I had a mild panic when I first powered on the new DRX895 with the imaged hard disk in and it did not convert and gave an error. This turned out to be because I did not have my sky card in the box. Once I put in the sky card the box immediately started the conversion. Everything is working well now.

So to recap if you want to copy the contents of a Sky+ box to a new Sky+HD with Darwin firmware then the process that worked for me is,

1. Sky+ (Pace) ==> pre-Darwin Sky+HD (Thomson)
2. pre-Darwin Sky+HD (Thomson) ==> Darwin Sky+HD (Amstrad DRX895)

It was a bit of a pain an obviously only doable if you have access to a Thomson Sky+HD box but I'm glad it's done now. I just hope that we see a Darwin compatible version of this outstanding utility (copy+) soon.

Cheers.
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Re: Thomson HD to Amstrad DRX890

Postby LeroyCain » Wed Dec 07, 2011 3:39 pm

I am trying to get recordings from (SD)Thomson+160 to Samsung+HD via Copy+ and a Thomson+HD as the workaround... but recordings are not showing up in the Samsung's planner. I have transferred the Thomson+160's image on to two different HDDs and both successfully show up in the Thomson+HD's planner and all is well... until either HDD is then moved to the Samsung+HD which functions normally but does not show any recordings in the planner list. If I put either HDD back in the Thomson+HD the recordings are all still there and not deleted/formatted by the 'Darwined' Samsung+HD as some have said. (Though perhaps if the conversion was successful they would no longer be viewable on the Thomson?).

I have tried 'Planner Rebuild' at various stages on all machines and disks and (an unpaired) Viewing Card both In and Out during boot-ups of the HD machines to see if that was the difference. I have never been aware of any HDD activity indicating 'conversion' of SD format to HD/Darwin format and nor have any messages been on screen to suggest something similar has happened.

Any suggestions anyone? Please?!
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Re: Thomson HD to Amstrad DRX890

Postby dan0001 » Thu Dec 08, 2011 4:33 pm

I have a feeling that there has been a recent update to Darwin that has killed off this way of upgrading. I know for sure (as I still have the working HD to prove it :) that going via a Thomson HD to get to a Darwin box has worked in the relatively recent past, but I also have been trying it over the last week on another old Sky+ disk full of programmes and the result is the same every time I try it - the programmes are still around on the Thomson HD, but when placed in the DRX890 there is no longer that useful screen message saying that it is updating and when the box is fully started up, the programmes are gone from the planner.

I can only assume that there has been a new Darwin/DRX890 (dunno which as I am not an expert in this!) update recently that has caused it to format any new disk it finds instead of doing that update thing that has worked so nicely in the past.

Anyone else seeing this behaviour? Any ideas how to force it to update instead of wipe?
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Re: Thomson HD to Amstrad DRX890

Postby LeroyCain » Thu Dec 08, 2011 8:38 pm

Unfortunately I think you might be right, Dan, about upgrading having been killed off. Or at least it seems that way for me.

Today, I put a clean HDD with a Copy+ image of Thomson160 recordings in the ThomsonHD. I then made 3 recordings on the ThomsonHD.

Then putting that HDD in the SamsungHD yielded no 'Upgrade' notices. No recordings visable in the Planner at all. Recorded 2 programmes on the SamsungHD.

Put HDD back in ThomsonHD. All original recordings visable plus the 3 'new' ones. (So no formatting of HDD took place) No evidence of the 2 recordings made on the SamsungHD in the Planner. Seems that recordings on two different versions (pre and post Darwin) are co-existing on the same HDD.

Long, rambly, stuff for which I apologise but I certainly cannot get it to up-convert via the ThomsonHD route...
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