New 2TB HDD Not Always Recognized On Boot

MofTot

Member
Dear all

The original 1TB Seagate Pipeline HD in my HDR FOX-T2 started suffering from one bad sector and bad SMART values (eg Disk pending sector count is: 8 and Disk offline sector count is: 8) so I started the process of cloning to a new drive.

Since I lately have had quite a few issues with failing Seagate drives (including this) I opted for a drive from Western Digital instead and also opted for a lager one - the 2TB WD20EURX. This is a SATA 6 Gbps drive and I would have preferred an older SATA 3 Gbps drive for compatibility but they're difficult to get as they're no longer produced.

I'm running custom FW 3.03. To my surprise the PVR couldn't format the new drive - I thought newer versions of the FW supported 2TB drives?

Anyway, I followed instructions from the following to create partitions:

http://wiki.hummy.tv/wiki/2TB_Disk_Installation_Blog

I tried using CloneZilla to clone the old drive partition-by-partition, but it failed cloning the large partition (with 277 recordings) in the last few minutes (after 12 hours) when it hit the bad sector, even though I had specified the -rescue parameter, which means it should ignore reading errors and continue. Instead, I formatted partition 2 and copied the existing recordings via an external USB caddy mounted on the box.

It all appeared to be working fine until I discovered that sometimes when the PVR boots it doesn't recognize the drive. I would say this happens in about 25% of the times it boots and obviously at that point it can't record anything. I've tried all sorts of combinations of power management (Settings > System > Power Management > Power Saving in Standby = On/Off) and also with/without jumpers on the HDD to control 150 MB/s data transfer speed and enabling power-up in standby but it doesn't seem to change anything.

When the box hasn't recognized the drive there is no way of getting it to see it again before I cold boot it. When powering down the box via the remote or front button the box shuts down cleanly (it takes a while). Always when the box starts up the HDD spins up.

fix-disk reports no errors and all SMART values look fine.

Are there any logs somewhere stored in flash memory for diagnostics of this kind of issue (obviously they can't be stored on the HDD when it's not recognized upon boot)? Are there any other non-Seagate 2TB drives that the PVR will recognize and format directly? Have any other users successfully used the WD20EURX drive in a HDR FOX-T2?

Thanks a lot for any pointers.

Cheers
 
There is a known issue with that particular model of drive and custom firmware version 3.03: see here. It is to do with the SATA drivers. If you aren't using a wireless dongle or the dlna-filter package you can download the kernel patch from the wiki downloads page and apply the standard firmware kernel over the custom firmware, or alterntively you could install custom firmware version 3.02 instead.
Presumably your old hard drive is not advanced format (4k sectors)? There is a known issue with the current version of fix-disk being unable to reallocate sectors on AF disks: this can be done manually. If it is not an AF disk, before binning it, try a security erase as this might force the sectors to be reallocated. There are a couple of threads on this site that discuss the security erase procedure.
 
I'm running custom FW 3.03. To my surprise the PVR couldn't format the new drive - I thought newer versions of the FW supported 2TB drives?
It is the standard firmware version that will determine whether a 2TB can be formatted; 1.03.xx should work.

Can't help with your main question; maybe one of the WD users can help?
 
There is a known issue with that particular model of drive and custom firmware version 3.03: see here.
Excellent, thank you so much for pointing that out! I've now downgraded to CFW 1.03.12/3.02, let's see how it goes.
Presumably your old hard drive is not advanced format (4k sectors)?
No, it was an original 512 byte sector drive. I'll keep it as a backup of the old recordings for now, even though I've transferred them to the new drive.
 
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