Pace 1Tb to Amstad DRX890 straight Disc Swap

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Pace 1Tb to Amstad DRX890 straight Disc Swap

Postby pcaplan » Tue May 22, 2012 11:02 am

Hi all

I'm confused - I have a Pace box 9f30 with a 1Tb drive. I dont know if this is pre or post Darwin it has the current epg.

I want to swap for a new Amstrad DRX890 which I can get free. Can I just swap out the drive with the 1Tb from my Pace box and expect to have all my recordings intact?

I'm sorry if this has been answered before but I cant find that info anywhere
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Re: Pace 1Tb to Amstad DRX890 straight Disc Swap

Postby pcbbc » Tue May 22, 2012 11:21 am

Check the software and EPG versions on both boxes. If they are the same, then a direct disk swap is likely to be possible.
If they are different, then it is down to how different and if the new box still contains the necessary code to convert from the legacy data formats. Sorry - There are simply far too many combinations of boxes and software for me to maintain an exhaustive list.
Regardless, Copy+ is not going to be able to help you achieve a successful swap here (even if it were Darwin compatible) - it is entirely down to the box software.

Disks of 1TB or less should have a compatible disk format between all boxes - so you are okay on that front. It was only the disks over 1TB that suffered compatibility problems with the Darwin EPG release.
However, even with a compatible disk format, you are still dependent on the box software versions as described above.

The best you can do is try it and see. Regrettably the new box may simply decide to FSR (i.e. re-format) the disk if it decides it is "incompatible".
You may be better simply retaining your Pace box (if this is possible) and swapping your card back and connecting a single feed until you have watched your old content. This is possible for all content except premium channel recordings (movies and sport).
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Re: Pace 1Tb to Amstad DRX890 straight Disc Swap

Postby pcaplan » Tue May 22, 2012 12:34 pm

pcbbc wrote:Check the software and EPG versions on both boxes. If they are the same, then a direct disk swap is likely to be possible.
If they are different, then it is down to how different and if the new box still contains the necessary code to convert from the legacy data formats. Sorry - There are simply far too many combinations of boxes and software for me to maintain an exhaustive list.



Thanks very much for the speedy and comprehensive response. I will do as you suggest and take it from there - I am mostly worried that the new DRX890 box will format the disc without warning and lose all my recordings. If I could ask a supplementary question is this what happens or will it give some warning to allow me to remove the 1Tb drive and restore it to my Pace box.

TIA for your help
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Re: Pace 1Tb to Amstad DRX890 straight Disc Swap

Postby pcbbc » Tue May 22, 2012 1:01 pm

Unfortunately no warning whatsoever.
If you have another 1TB drive, do a sector level clone of the disk using a disk ghosting tool. You should then be able to restore your disk if the worst happens.
Please note that this must be done at the raw disk level, and not using any tool that inspects the FAT file system and attempts to be clever by only backing up used sectors.

A quicker option that offers some protection against a reformat would be use the backup utility.
I have an equivalent reverse tool that restores such a disk, which I could send you. While this is not a complete backup (it does not backup any of the actual video from the recordings) it would allow a restore so long as no new recordings had been made on the new disk in the meantime (watch out for Anytime and Instant Rewind making "recordings" behind your back).
The principle is that it restores all the other disk structures (file system, files etc) in the same place they were previously and relies on the actual video data not having been overwritten in the meantime. But if new recordings had been made, and those occupied some area of the disk previously used by old recordings, then they would be overwritten and those effected recordings would be unplayable - either in whole or part.

Note that when a Sky disk "reformats" a disk it only ever does a quick format (by re-writing empty disk structures) and never by physically zeroing every sector on the disk (which would take far too long).
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Re: Pace 1Tb to Amstad DRX890 straight Disc Swap

Postby kos129 » Tue May 22, 2012 1:11 pm

With Darwin, it tends to give a "Technical Error" instead of just wiping the drive if it finds a planner it cannot read. Making a backup first would still be advisable though just in case it does do something weird. As long as the boxes are up to date (and you have not enrolled in the beta version for the Amstrad), there should not be a problem however as the planners should have the same version (and even if they didn't, the newer software seems to be quite good at upgrading from old versions, I have tried copying a planner from the initial version to my box about a month ago, and it converted it fine).
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Re: Pace 1Tb to Amstad DRX890 straight Disc Swap

Postby pcaplan » Tue May 22, 2012 1:19 pm

Thanks for your help

I'm no longer confused - I Have a plan! - well a good way to proceed anyway. I was really unsure about what might happen when you swap a drive from one box to a newer box. I thank I can now cope with all the possibilities. Thanks
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