Official Response to Sky+HD 1TB Box Issue

News and general announcements about Copy+

Official Response to Sky+HD 1TB Box Issue

Postby pcbbc » Thu Oct 14, 2010 8:50 am

Thursday 14 October 08:50

If you've been following the forum thread, you will be aware that owners of the Amstrad DRX895 1.5TB box (and user upgraded DRX890 boxes with 1.5TB or 2TB drives) have been suffering recording glitches and overwrites from other recordings since the latest Sky ("Darwin") software release.

Last night Sky made the following announcement on their website:
1Tb Sky+HD Issues - Update 13/10/2010 - 19:00

Investigations continue into the issues reported by a minority of Sky+HD 1Tb customers.


We have identified an issue with fan control that can cause the set top box fan to switch on during initialisation but not switch off again. We have a fix for this under development and will roll that out once testing is complete.

We are on the track of an issue which causes a brief glitch in a recording when another simultaneous recording ends. We are still building understanding of the root cause and to identify a fix for this problem.

We now understand the root cause of an issue with Copy+ software used on the set top box prior to the latest software update that can cause an error in the filesystem which is critical to the new software, causing corruption to planner and recorded content. We are aware that many of the issues reported by customers are not caused by Copy+ but customers who have used Copy+ will need to perform a full system reset. We regret that some of our customers are suffering from this, but reiterate that Copy+ is not a Sky product and is not supported or endorsed by us.

We are continuing to pursue other avenues of investigation, including reports of temporary loss of planner (recovered by repowering the set top box), and reports of crashing.

As part of the investigation, we are contacting customers who are known to have experienced issues through all available routes, gathering information and examples of set top boxes to support our investigation and resolving issues for customers on an individual basis wherever possible.

Further updates will be provided as the investigations continue.

We would like to sincerely apologise to all of our users with "1TB" boxes, and also to Sky, for the inconvenience caused by this issue, which does indeed appear t be caused by a filesystem discrepancy introduced by Copy+.

We appreciate that Sky can not be responsible for testing for compatibility with a third party application such as Copy+, but then equally it is impossible for us to test against future Sky software releases as we have no advance knowledge of what they may contain. It is an unfortunate situation for all concerned.

We fully accept that the best course of action for effected users would be to perform a Full System Reset as suggested by Sky. However we accept that some users my have recordings which they do not wish to lose, and so wish to offer a possible, if somewhat more technical, alternative.

To that end we are continuing to investigate and believe we are close to developing an application to fix the inconsistencies in pre and post update recordings so that they no longer risk overwriting each other. Please note that any such "fix" will not be able to recover already lost or damaged content, however it will prevent further losses in the future. Any such fix, as with using Copy+ in the first place, would of course be entirely at the users own risk. While we finalise testing this tool, users can minimise the risk of overwriting further recordings, by avoiding making new recordings or deleting content. However we fully understand if users would prefer to follow Sky's advice and regrettably have to FSR their system.

Once again we would like to sincerely apologise to all our users effected by this unfortunate incident and the subsequent loss of recordings.

Please continue discussion in the forums if you have any concerns or questions.
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Re: Official Response to Sky+HD 1TB Box Issue

Postby pcbbc » Wed Oct 27, 2010 3:46 am

Wednesday 27 October 03:46

Today we are releasing version 1.2.0.8 of Copy+ which has been designed to partially address the overwriting issue highlighted above.

Please note that this version of Copy+ is NOT able to copy disks from boxes which have already been upgraded to Darwin. This requires major changes which we are also currently working on. Unfortunately we are unable to give any time scales for when this might be ready.

However, this release addresses an issues with regard to copying from pre-Darwin boxes to disks over 1TB (i.e. 1.5TB or 2.0TB) such that they are ready for Darwin.

Which Copy+ 1.2.0.8 you can now safely:
a) Copy from a pre-Darwin system to the supplied 1.5TB disk for use in either a pre-Darwin or Darwin upgraded box. When the Sky Darwin software is eventually downloaded to your box your recordings will NOT suffer the overwriting issue previously experienced by Copy+ users who used the 1.2.0.6 or 1.2.0.7 releases to perform their upgrade.
b) Copy from a pre-Darwin system to a 2.0TB disk for use in a Darwin upgraded box. Please note that non-standard size disks over 1TB (i.e. 2.0TB) will NOT be compatible unless your destination box has already received the Darwin update. If you use the disk on a pre-Darwin system you will have the same overwriting issue as described above. This is because there is no way to make a non-standard disk over 1TB both forward and backward compatible with both Sky software releases. As a result we have chosen to make Copy+ forward compatible with Darwin ONLY for these non-standard disks.

Please note:
1. This issue only effects disks over 1TB. For all disks under 1TB there is no overwriting issue with this, or any previous releases of Copy+.
2. Disks over 1TB are only compatible with Amstrad Sky+HD boxes to the best of our knowledge.
3. Copying of source disks from boxes upgraded to the Darwin software is not possible at present. Please wait for a future release of Copy+ which will support this.

As always, please continue discussion in the forums if you have any concerns or questions.
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Re: Official Response to Sky+HD 1TB Box Issue

Postby pcbbc » Mon Nov 01, 2010 1:33 am

Monday 1 November 2010 00:30

Today we are releasing our fix tool for disks over 1TB prepared with Copy+ versions 1.2.0.6 or 1.2.0.7
Support Tools: Post-Darwin Copy+ Alignment Fixer
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