kungfuman228 wrote:I currently have a normal sky+ box which has had the hard disk upgraded using a 750gb sata WD 'ecogreen' type drive. I believe 80gb of this is reserved for anytime and therefore have about 670gb for my recordings.
A normal Sky+ box would have a PATA disk, not SATA. So unless you have an adapter board installed, you have a PATA drive.
1. can you just swap the hard drive out with the one I have now and it will still recognise the recordings? I think the box is a Amstrad DRX280 (from the compatibilty list) therefore has 'big' endian format.
Drive would need to be SATA, and destination box would need to be big endian (most HD boxes are big) AND the box can **NOT** have the new Darwin software release.
SD to HD transfers/copies are no longer possible once the destination box has Darwin.
2. If possible, will anytime now take up 250gb instead of the 80gb?
Assuming there is sufficient free space, yes.
Do not suggest transferring if there is insufficient free space to make up the difference - so delete stuff on SD box to make 250-80=170GB of room first. Otherwise planner will show FULL and box may well malfunction.
3. If this is not possible, will the workaround this be: 1. Back up my existing recordings onto my PC. 2. Insert my 750gb into the new sky+hd box and perform a FSR so it will format the drive correctly. 3. Remove the hd from box and copy back the recordings onto the drive?
Copy+ does all it's own formatting, so it is pointless to format the drive first.
The only point in doing this is if you wish to use the supplied (presumably 500GB) drive instead of the 750 (because it is PATA or unsuitable). In this case copy direct from source to destination (you will need to delete the existing partition off the "empty" destination 500GB).
Again, this transfer will ***NOT** work if destination box has Darwin.
4. I will contemplate upgrading to a larger drive, am I understanding correctly that at the moment most 1tb drives are compatible with most of the sky+hd boxes (leaving 750gb recording space)?
All HD boxes will function with a 1TB drive or one type or another, subject to it being "compatible".
Nobody knows what makes a drive compatible with a particular box. Also older boxes (Thomson for example) are known to get slower with larger drives.
1.5tb/2tb drives are only compatible with the newer Amstrad boxes but I will need to have a fiddle to get the box working with a beta version of copy+ and I wont be able to restore my existing recordings.
Correct - And I only recommend a drive over 1TB with a Darwin upgraded box, as otherwise you will get recording overwrites with any new recordings until such time as you receive Darwin.
As this advice is incompatible with transfer from SD (you need a NON-Darwin box for that to work), do not recommend a drive over 1TB!
This advice is really only relevant if coming from a HD box without Darwin to a HD box *with* Darwin (yes that is currently possible)!
There is currently no upgrade path to keep recordings if you have:
1. Darwin on the source box, regardless of destination
2. Source box is SD and destination box has Darwin (destination without Darwin may still work)
That is, until such time as a Darwin compatible Copy+ is released. This will probably NEVER resolve point 2 - SD to HD transfers - which IMHO will be impossible ongoing (planner formats have diverged to far).
No time scales for a release at present - Sorry.
Also I can not guarantee SD to HD transfers definitely work any more even if you do NOT have Darwin. They have definitely stopped working since Darwin.
So if it doesn't work for you, I'm sorry. Please make other backups of your recordings if they are that important.