It is easy to replace a failed hard drive in the Youview DTR-T2110 (BT Branded DTR-T2100)
Posting as searching these forums yielded a few posts asking about it, but no one posting any successes aside from the first-generation retail boxes. This is the DTR-T2100, but with BT branding.
Yesterday morning my BT branded youview box wouldn't get past its loading screen ("Almost Ready..."), and using the maintenance mode to try any reset options resulted in "Failed". Maintenance mode is reached by holding "Down" on the top of the box from Off (red light shown).
This box is 18 months old, and not under any BT contract. BT would replace it if I signed up for a new 12 month contract, but that was not a good deal.
It is straightforward to take out the four screws on the bottom (one under a warranty sticker), and the screw above the SCART connector to lift the top off.
The hard drive is plainly visible, but is screwed in from underneath.
You then need to remove two screws holding the board down, and can then flip it over.
Remove the four screws holding the hard drive in. There is enough space below the lower RF shield/heat plate so that you don't need to remove it to unscrew those four screws enough to remove the hard drive.
Now simply remove the hard drive, and plug in your replacement.
Trying to mount the drive in windows or Linux found only a single 4GB partition, and using the lovely TestDisk software to search for partitions threw up read errors at every sector.
My box had a 500GB hard drive, but I only had a 250GB 2.5" SATA laptop hard drive handy, so that's what I used.
Screws back in, re-assemble, and plug in. I didn't expect it to work without maintenance mode, so I went straight there. I used the "Internet/USB Recovery (Delete Recordings)" option, and about 5 minutes later, the box rebooted, and went to first time setup (Enter post code, scan for channels, update the software, etc).
It has been working fine and recording since yesterday.
In short:
-No need to mimic the partition table of the old drive, the box will do it for you. My drive had a single exFAT partition
-I used a smaller drive, not larger, just due to what I had handy. I would imagine a 1TB would work as they sell 1TB models, but larger than that might not work.
-If I hadn't mucked about trying to get the partition table to apply to the new drive, this would have taken 5 minutes total.
Thanks Youview
Yesterday morning my BT branded youview box wouldn't get past its loading screen ("Almost Ready..."), and using the maintenance mode to try any reset options resulted in "Failed". Maintenance mode is reached by holding "Down" on the top of the box from Off (red light shown).
This box is 18 months old, and not under any BT contract. BT would replace it if I signed up for a new 12 month contract, but that was not a good deal.
It is straightforward to take out the four screws on the bottom (one under a warranty sticker), and the screw above the SCART connector to lift the top off.
The hard drive is plainly visible, but is screwed in from underneath.
You then need to remove two screws holding the board down, and can then flip it over.
Remove the four screws holding the hard drive in. There is enough space below the lower RF shield/heat plate so that you don't need to remove it to unscrew those four screws enough to remove the hard drive.
Now simply remove the hard drive, and plug in your replacement.
Trying to mount the drive in windows or Linux found only a single 4GB partition, and using the lovely TestDisk software to search for partitions threw up read errors at every sector.
My box had a 500GB hard drive, but I only had a 250GB 2.5" SATA laptop hard drive handy, so that's what I used.
Screws back in, re-assemble, and plug in. I didn't expect it to work without maintenance mode, so I went straight there. I used the "Internet/USB Recovery (Delete Recordings)" option, and about 5 minutes later, the box rebooted, and went to first time setup (Enter post code, scan for channels, update the software, etc).
It has been working fine and recording since yesterday.
In short:
-No need to mimic the partition table of the old drive, the box will do it for you. My drive had a single exFAT partition
-I used a smaller drive, not larger, just due to what I had handy. I would imagine a 1TB would work as they sell 1TB models, but larger than that might not work.
-If I hadn't mucked about trying to get the partition table to apply to the new drive, this would have taken 5 minutes total.
Thanks Youview
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Comments
https://community.youview.com/youview...
Please do one or the other - unfocussed negativity helps no-one, least of all yourself :-(
Will this box only take a 2.5" drive or was that your only spare?
If you're keen about it, I would buy a cheapo 22-pin SATA extender cable set off monoprice/amazon/ebay or other fine retailer for £5, and extend the connector out of the youview box, and try out a huge hard drive outside the youview box and report back. Obviously risk of damage, cat running away, etc.
What make/model was the original hard drive in the box that failed after 18 months?
On the Toppy's, hard drive failure was associated with faulty capacitors, and since I am about to replace the capacitors on my trial Youview box as I did on the Toppy, I am curious as to whether this was a hard drive that failed of it's own accord or whether the newer Youview boxes also have cheap capacitors in that could lead to subsequent drive failures.
Steve O.
That was the primary reason for my post.
I have considered adding BT TV to my package in order to get a new box for 'free' but if the latest boxes are failing the same way as the older boxes seem to (due to capacitors) I am unlikely to bother.
If the 'hard drive failure' rate doesn't bear any correlation to the manufacturers MTBF then this would give some indication that the capacitors are (still) a problem. Even if we don't have a statistically significant sample, it may be an indicator.
Steve O
If you have a BT contract it would be their responsibility if the box failed, but you would lose your recordings.
I have both a retail T2000 and a BT G4 T2100 and have no problems to report. Both boxes run warm but not hot.
I did take a 5 second look at the three (?) electrolytic capacitors that were on the board. None were obviously puffy/leaking/etc. I've replaced plenty of bad caps in varied electronics; these didn't seem suspect.
Looks like Seagate are now using AFR rather than MTBF and are looking at @ 0.5% failure rate per year on those drives (will increase significantly if they are getting hot).
None of the capacitors in my Youview box are bulging or look in any way suspect - but then they didn't in my Toppy either, however replacing them resolved the issue.
Interestingly it was specifically the caps on the power supply board that were faulty in the Toppy, but in this box the ones on the Motherboard seem to be an issue. Obviously the design is different with far fewer caps on the power board than on the Toppy and at least 2 people have reported replacing the Youview Power Supply board which hasn't resolved the problem(s).
My box was always unplugged when not in use and could equally fail at power up (from cold) as when in use - if not more so. Which seems to point to caps failing I guess, although whether the caps have failed prematurely due to heat I can't say - but my box only saw a few hours use in the evenings before being unplugged again and is not in an enclosed space.
I have ordered some new caps (plus braid and solder) and will see how I get on. If that doesn't fix it I'll maybe look at more internal cooling and then the caps on the power board.
Steve O.
Rexford, was that 500 drive spinning, could you tell?
SteveOC, turning your YouView box off at night, and then running it up from cold (especially if it was literally cold) is the perfect storm for stuck drive syndrome.
Chickens and eggs spring to mind.:-)
My drive is fine, as is the WD drive I swapped it with so I doubt that is the issue. In fact any time I see Sam Young capacitors now I anticipate problems.
You think the drives might have been blowing the capacitors? :-)
https://getsatisfaction.com/getsatisf...
I thought it was bunnys?