HDD not initialising in box but fine on a PC

everthewatcher

everthewatcher

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The box failed to auto power up this evening so I power cycled it. Up came BBC1 as normal but no response to remote or front panel. Web interface out too. Bother.

Pulled the cover off. HDD was spun up and quietly clicking, just like a normal seek but suspiciously repetitive. Powered it down, disconnected the HDD data connection and powered it back up. I now had a working box but only in HD Fox mode.

Pulled the HDD out, installed EXT2FSD in read-only mode on a Windows PC, plugged in the disk and was able to read it and play unencrypted stuff. So it looks like the disk is OK.

Put an old spare 500GB full-height drive in, powered it up and off it went. It formatted OK and the box seemed quite happy with it. Swapped the old drive back just in case still no go.

So it looks like the HDD isn't being initialised by the box. Any suggestions? If it's been covered before I apologise, just point me in the right direction. Next planned step will be copy stuff off, reformat and copy back on - I take it that'll work?

The box is the revised one with the vertical tuner connections running CFW 3.10 with a Seagate HD. I've posted this here as there was mention of the latest CFW having a fix for drive initialisation problems.

Edit: Should add that this box has been working fine since December 2014.

MTIA,

Graham
 
Problem is it can't see the disc* so no CFW tools are available, and I don't have Linux.

What's puzzling me is it appears fine on a Windows PC with EXT2FSD but fails to initialise on in the Hummy. My first thought was a power supply issue but the 5 & 12V rails to the disk are fine plus it's quite happy with the 7-year old non-video Samsung drive.

The problematic drive has only 4000 or so hours on it and if dud continues my experience of only having had Seagate drives fail in service.

Graham

* Edit: It can see it but not initialise it.
 
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Not having Linux is no impediment - just download a Live Linux CD/DVD image and boot from that.

Despite your "working" result when connected to PC, the fact that another drive works in the Humax when this one doesn't strongly suggests there is something wrong with it.
 
If you load the 3.10d firmware, you might see something useful in the output of the 'dmesg' command.
You could also try 3.10k which includes the stock Humax kernel.
 
Many thanks for the advice. Once I'd got the HDR working again with an old drive the pressure was off.

SeaTools says it fails the basic drive self test and suggests bad sectors, and going by its behaviour it looks like one is used by a critical file on the HDR. FTTB I've left it at that. Ext2FSD has started misbehaving on this machine so a there's an Ultimate Boot CD here ready to have a go at pulling off the stuff before I try any repair on it.

On the basis that where there's one bad sector there's others, which is surprising with only 4466 hours on it (but then it is a Seagate drive and this one makes it four of them to fail on me in service against none from others), I'm resigned to getting a new drive and using this one in a less arduous duties like backup if it can be brought back into use.

I've no need to go above 1TB so the choice of replacement drives seems to be the Seagate ST1000VM002 and the WD10EURX, the latter for obvious reasons being the one I'd prefer. Does anyone have any advice or other suggestions?

Edit: Yes, I now know UBCD isn't what I needed to copy stuff off. I'm posting this via Iceweasel on a Knoppix CD while the files are being copied off the old disk.

Graham
 
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Update: Now this is interesting.

Copied everything off it (or nearly everything as some stuff moved over from my old '9200 couldn't be opened as the files were now marked 'Owner Only', which the copies on this PC weren't) and I made no intentional changes to the disc contents.

This morning I set SeaTools 'Fix All' > 'Long' to work on it using a USB interface - SeaTools couldn't see it if connected directly. To my surprise it came back clear with no repairs listed and the Short Drive Self Test now comes back OK.

So on the face of it it was a soft bad sector problem and just the act of putting it in a Linux machine sorted it. Is this possible?
 
Put it back in and it ran up OK.

The web interface told me there was a Pending sector count & Offline sector count of 1, registered when the problem first arose but without the web i/f running I couldn't see it. The SMART info it went on to display showed no current problems but just in case I ran fix-disk which returned NFF as expected.

So that's it for now.

Worth knowing that a disk with problem sector that prevent the web i/f running can apparently be fixed simply by running it up in a Linux PC.
 
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