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Recovering device

I

InteraX

Member
Hi all,

My HDR suddenly failed after about 18 months of meaning to replace a failing HDD.

Initially, the HDR was in a boot/crash loop. I couldn't get to any UI. Firstly, I swapped out the original HDD with a 2TB drive I already had hanging around. The boot loop carried on after that.

I followed the 'Steps for Resolving HDR-FOX Crash/Reboot Issues'. After flashing the 'System Flush' update my box booted.

To start with, video was stuttery. After about 1/2 an hour, it was OK. I then started to follow the instructions in '2TB Disk Installation Blog'.

When I run 'gfdisk -lu /dev/sda' I get a message about partition ending not being aligned to cylinder boundaries. Full output is below.

Disk /dev/sda: 2000 GB, 2000396321280 bytes
255 heads, 63 sectors/track, 243201 cylinders, total 3907024065 sectors
Units = sectors of 1 * 512 = 512 bytes

Device Boot Start End Blocks Id System
/dev/sda1 8 2104510 1052226 83 Linux
Warning: Partition 1 does not end on cylinder boundary.
/dev/sda2 2104512 3886043166 1941969330 83 Linux
Warning: Partition 2 does not end on cylinder boundary.
/dev/sda3 3886043168 3907024062 10490445 83 Linux
Warning: Partition 3 does not end on cylinder boundary.

I think these are the partitions created automatically by the device. The start of each partition is divisible by 8, but the end is not and there seems to be some unused sectors between the partitions.

Should I be worried about this or should this be OK? I want to get the disk formatted and the custom FW re-installed.

Thanks.
 
The blog was written before a firmware update made 2TB available for native formatting. Just run a format from the Humax menu and only worry about it if that fails.
 
All 3 partitions were created, but formatting on sda2 and sda3 failed.
I manually formatted them using the commands in the blog and I'm now up and running.
 
InteraX said:
When I run 'gfdisk -lu /dev/sda' I get a message about partition ending not being aligned to cylinder boundaries.
Click to expand...
Cylinder boundaries is a concept that's outdated by at least 20 years. I don't know why they (gfdisk authors) persist in issuing warnings about such trivialities in this day and age.
The start of each partition is divisible by 8, but the end is not and there seems to be some unused sectors between the partitions.

Should I be worried about this or should this be OK?
Click to expand...
It's the start number that's important. The end is completely irrelevant. There is only a gap of 1. This is also completely irrelevant.
So, yes it's OK and no need to worry.
 
Since the Note was added to the 2TB blog in 2014 there have been several posts where the poster has not noticed the note. Could someone with access rights update the note's wording so that it is a bit more forceful and prominent. E.g. change the wording from
1570187199511.png
to something like
1570187359974.png
and also move the Note to the top of the blog.
 
However the 2TB blog instructions do include file system optimisations that (AFAIK) aren't included in the formatting command used by the Humax code, some of which can't be applied retrospectively with tune2fs. As a result disk usage would be less efficient.

Apparently the Humax blob contains a little mke2fs clone using libext2fs so you can't just patch the parameters in some embedded mke2fs command.
 
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