• The forum software that supports hummy.tv has been upgraded to XenForo 2.3!

    Please bear with us as we continue to tweak things, and feel free to post any questions, issues or suggestions in the upgrade thread.

Hard Disk issues

J

jerrytaff

Member
I have had a number of recordings recently which have just stopped part way through even though the HDR indicates that the recording should be complete. I have also been getting a number of disk errors. The custom firmware diagnostics have been giving a steadily increasing number of Reallocated Sectors and recently some uncorrectable errors.
I copied all my files onto my network in preparation of reformatting the disk to see if that would stabilise the situation.

However the machine itself tells me that the disk is fine. When I tried to format it anyway, it refused telling me the disk is too big to format. Yet it is the standard 500GByte disk it came with.

How do I proceed (other than by replacing the hard disk).
 
jerrytaff said:
When I tried to format it anyway, it refused telling me the disk is too big to format. Yet it is the standard 500GByte disk it came with.
Click to expand...
This happened to me... I think something in the CF or one of the packages stops it being able to unmount the disk partition(s). The "too big" error is just cr@p programming on Humax's part - assuming any error, no matter what the cause, is because someone has changed the disk for something it can't cope with.
Try a fix-disk using telnet to get into maintenance mode. If that can't fix it, then format the disk manually from a command prompt.

(This thread should be in the CF section of the forum)
 
jerrytaff said:
I have had a number of recordings recently which have just stopped part way through even though the HDR indicates that the recording should be complete. I have also been getting a number of disk errors. The custom firmware diagnostics have been giving a steadily increasing number of Reallocated Sectors and recently some uncorrectable errors.
Click to expand...
Perhaps you could tell us the number of reallocated sectors and the uncorrectable errors (which are more important)?
 
Thanks for your replies. Black hole - I was aware of the Wiki, and had used the telnet based tools several times. Martin, I tried to cut and paste the diagnostic table into my post but the formatting was cr@p and I didn't have time to sort it out before going to work.​
​
Prtpr - I agree about the cr@p programming, but don't agree that the posting should come under CF. I was reporting disk errors and a box that refused to do what it should from the remote.​
​
The odd thing is that I got the error message about the disk being too big to format (after entering Format Disk (Menu >> Settings >> System >> Data Storage >> Format Storage) several times, but after powering the box down, when it came up it came up it showed a disk diagnostics screen I hadn't seen before telling me that I had no disk space left on a zero size disk. At that point when I tried formatting it, it seems to have worked. I'll post again later to let you know if I'm still getting disk errors and incomplete recordings.​
 
So, it is currently recording Holby having been formatted. I just entered the Web Interface and got:

"To install the full web interface and supporting packages a suitably formatted internal hard disk must be present and none was detected. This is unexpected - a HDR-Fox T2 should have an internal disk which is already formatted appropriately."

So its recording but doesn't have a visible hard disk. I assume that after a power reset it will reappear to the outside world.
 
jerrytaff said:
I don't agree that the posting should come under CF. I was reporting disk errors and a box that refused to do what it should from the remote.
Click to expand...
Post #1 in this thread mentions "custom firmware diagnostics". Seeing as this thread has been moved, one of the mods. obviously seems to have agreed with me.
​
 
Thanks for all your help so far...

Recordings are noted as full length These is no warning that the recording failed, but on perhaps one in 5 the playback stops at a random place, perhaps 20 minutes into a film.

Looking at the diagnostics,
ID 5, the reallocated sector count has been steadily increasing. It is currently at 099 compared with a threshold of 036. Flags PO--CK
ID 197 Current Pending Sector and 198 Offline Uncorrectable both have values of 100 compared with a threshold of 000

I had previously run the maintenance mode disk fix, which did not appear to make a lot of difference but I didn't note the details of its report. I have just run it again. It started with a short test, tells me that it found pending sector error(s), and that the LBA had not yet been found and has gone into a long test (warned me it might take 1hr 48 mins to complete). When complete I shall let you know the outcome.

From what I've reported so far, what are the chances that I'm going to need to replace the disk. If so can anyone suggest a suitable replacement?
 
I left fix disk running and went to bed. This morning it come to the end of its long check and I think it asked me if it should use the unallocated (spare) LBA it had found. (I was still half asleep and just went along with its suggestion whatever it was). I then got page after page of inode errors which it automatically fixed (many blocks said there were too many to fix) .

It then started e2fschk ) and came up with many more pages of inode errors (illegal blocks). At some point it got too many and informed me it was starting again. E2fschk the got to the end of the parse, then started scanning for multiple claimed blocks - again found large numbers of errors.....etc. Eventually it came to an end. If it is of any value I can extract the log from /mnt/hd3/fix-disk.log and attach, but it is quite big...

Bottom line is that this has cleared the reported problem Current Pending Sector and Offline Uncorrectable. The raw value of the reallocated sector count is 61. I think it was 60 yesterday, but I might be mistaken.
 
Nothing would seem to indicate a major physical problem with the disk so there is no point in replacing it at this time. If fix-disk can't fix the filesystem errors then you will probably need to format it (it seems better to use a manual command than let the Humax software do it, from what's been written elsewhere).
 
Thanks prpr. Fix-disk found literally thousands of errors. And that was only one day and 2 recordings after I reformatted the disk. I can't believe that the Humax software could be so very different than a manual fdisk command. How can there be thousands of inode errors and block allocation errors when there were so few files on the system? Or does the inbuilt Hummy software just lie and delete the files instead of formatting the disk?
 
You must log in or register to reply here.
Back
Top