Black Hole
May contain traces of nut
Last edited by a moderator:
-
The forum software that supports hummy.tv will be upgraded to XenForo 2.3 on Wednesday the 20th of November 2024 starting at 7pm
There will be some periods where the forum is unavailable, please bear with us. More details can be found in the upgrade thread.
Disk faults
- Thread starter Black Hole
- Start date
Umpa
Member
Yeah - I will look in to that. I do have a copy of spinrite and HDRegenerator so I might stick it on that too. I am thinking of installing a bigger one anyway, the cost per MB is very affordable at the moment. It might even be quicker than messing with the old.
OP
Black Hole
May contain traces of nut
It's not a hard disk fault I'm talking about, more likely the file system has got itself in a twist and needs purging of errors. The CF has the tools you need, DO NOT try anything else. Above all, NEVER use Spinrite or other low-level tools on a modern HDD!
Umpa
Member
I ran the tool and it output this, is this a format job or can it be recovered ?
Code:
Checking partition tables...
Warning! Main partition table CRC mismatch! Loaded backup partition table
instead of main partition table!
Warning! One or more CRCs don't match. You should repair the disk!
MBR Status: MBR only
GPT Status: damaged
MBR only disk with damaged GPT. Manual intervention required!
Aborting.
fix-disk: session terminated with exit status 1
Press return to continue:
OP
Black Hole
May contain traces of nut
That raises a load of questions, such as: do you have a HDD fitted that is > 2TB? If so, did you do it?
OP
Black Hole
May contain traces of nut
It's the "GPT" business that is confusing me - that's for drives over 2TB and is definitely not supported by the standard Humax firmware.
Why is that? Was Spinrite ever the magic tool that the testimonials Steve Gibson put forward claimed it was?
I gave up listening to Steve Gibson some years ago unable to work out whether he just liked the sound of his own voice, or if he was a snake oil peddlar, or if he was indeed some sort of expert.
Umpa
Member
I used the GPTF because the error fixdisk reported was due to that and said it needed a manual intervention [whatever that means].
What happened was it did its stuff, fixdisk said all good, and the box works. So all is good.
Umpa
Member
Yeah I agree, I do like to listen to SN, but must admit SR has never fixed a disk for me. He says its good on SSD too!
I have had more success with HDRegen, If my qnap's are on yellow warning then it may 'fix' the disk, but if its on 'red abnormal' then the drive is toast I have found out. Provided your happy the drive is FUBAR and dont need the data on it, then you may as well SR and HDR on them, you have nothing to lose - its already gone.
Looks like I went down the exact same route as you (right down to that manual intervention message - whatever that is!) about 3 weeks ago, I think I ended up wiping the hard drive using GParted in Ubuntu, and starting over again.
Umpa
Member
Did your box not work after ? or did it not function correctly after ?
I can’t be sure but it seemed to me that running fixdisk made the box very unstable; at times it crashed early on during boot up. Perhaps that’s because I should have run fixdisk through a Windows laptop rather than a mobile device, which would sometimes time out. But also the box would sometimes crash early on in fixdisk. In the end I fitted a new HDD and that solved the problem.
After about 3 weeks of working on it, I decided the 2 most important tools by far were patience and perseverance.
Umpa
Member
Oh right - ok. FWIW fixdisk completed for me with no errors, after using the GPTF. If I have problems, I will have another go. Still toying with the idea of putting a 3TB drive in for a laugh. I have 1 or 2 kicking around but not of the correct type.
If nothing else, it won’t be time wasted. I learned a lot from my troubleshooting, whereas beforehand I was very unfamiliar with the developments of the CFW in the last few years. It was like starting from scratch. But the forums posts and Black Hole’s guides came in very handy. Sometimes it’s good to jump in at the deed end and have to swim!
OP
Black Hole
May contain traces of nut
Well, I might be out of date, but in my day Spinrite was a utility which optimised HDD operation at the lowest level, in the days when a HDD was fairly simple - just a means of positioning a read/write head over the disc and recording/reading 1's and 0's to it. It relied on having that degree of low-level access, and added a layer of sophistication over what the drive manufacturers built in.
Drives are not like that any more. To maximise the storage density, the manufacturers have tuned all the performance parameters to the point there is no slack to be removed by a third-party utility, and any interference risks buggering it up. Neither am I sure low-level formatting is available to the external world. Modern drives have "virtual" cylinder, head, and sector addressing to overcome limitations in the maximum values - there is a layer of electronics built into the drive which performs these translations (which never used to be there in the pre-SATA drives), so software running on the host doesn't actually "see" the raw disc surface at all.
This translation layer also handles defect correction. During manufacture, the disc surface is scanned in minute detail and any faulty sectors noted. That was always the case, but now instead of just marking those sectors "faulty, do not use" for the formatting tools to deal with, the translation layer is programmed to substitute good sectors into those cylinder-head-sector addresses from a pool of spare sectors. That means the drive will have the full specified capacity regardless of hard sector faults.
One last thing "old school" low-level tools could do is adjust the interleave. Tracks are read/written sector by sector. To access a particular sector, the system has to wait until that particular sector comes around and then it is read into / written from a buffer memory. Then the system has to prepare to read/write the next sector. If "Sector 2" is immediately adjacent to "Sector 1" on the track, chances are it will have already started passing the head (or already passed the head) by the time the system is ready for it, and the system will have a delay while that sector comes around again.
Interleaving puts "Sector 2" further around the track, so that it comes under the head just after the system is ready for it rather than just before. This dramatically improves the sustained data rate onto/off the drive, and of course all that is now built into the drive at manufacture and does not require third-party tuning. (Modern drives have large data buffers and the operating system interacts with the buffer rather than the disc itself - in the old days memory was expensive.)
The last thing you want to do is meddle with any of the above, even if the control electronics (built into the drive, between the system and the disc interface) will let you. Once upon a time, the control electronics was an adapter card in the PC and the drive was little more than a motor, a disc, and a head. Not so now - your only access to the drive is "high level", and it would be foolish to try to circumvent that.
Forensic disc recovery/analysis now bypasses the drive's internal electronics by opening up and connecting directly to the drive components, so that the lab can actually see the "real" untranslated view of the disc surface.
OP
Black Hole
May contain traces of nut
Fair point, although it is lost time if hopeless.
fixdisk can't cure everything, but you do need to ensure you have the latest.
No, fixdisk is buffered through abduco so the session continues even if your terminal times out (or you exit).
This will need the CF extensions for handling GPT drives. Note GPT drives are not compatible with standard Humax firmware (ie without CF). See https://wiki.hummy.tv/wiki/Very_Large_Hard_Drive
If you've been playing with the "gptf" menu option on a sub-2TB drive, you've probably unnecessarily converted your drive to GPT (and reformatted it in the process). Questions posted on this forum (instead of blindly poking things) might have guided you to a recovery rather than a reformat.
Umpa
Member
To be fair, I am never taking the CFW off. I have had the box years, so well out of warranty & I cant see a use case for it with out the CFW. I have even considered getting a second box purely because of the CFW. Its like having an electric car, once you have experienced it - you can't go back to the old way.
All my recordings are backed up every night [there is a silly reason for this]. Provided the GPT format does not adversely affect operation, it should be good ??
When all is said and done you are quite correct about blindly poking things, my only defence is that the maintenance mode mentions the words format hard drive, and does not explain what GPT is, for all I knew that was the disk format anyway - lol.