Backing up USB drive?

[mikejstb]

I had a scare today - my 722 suddenly said my external USB drive had been used on a different receiver (no - I only have one receiver) and said if I wanted to continue I would lose all programs on it! I rebooted the 722, no good. I powered off the USB drive for a few minutes and everything came back to life.

Before it came back to life I called Dish tech support and they said I had no choice but to reformat it. Jerks.

I'm glad it came back but it got me worrying. I have lots of computers, can run about any Windows or Linux OS - has anyone here had any success backing up their USB drives by using a regular computer? Maybe dd'ing it to another disk, anything like that that has been tried and tested?

Thanks in advance!

 

[DishSubLA]

It is designed NOT to allow back ups (as per demands of the content owners). Any hacks to do so aren't going to be posted here.

 

[tigerfan33]

I lost all of my content the other day.

Even after a few hard re-boots I still got the same message about needing to format the drive. There went about 150 hours of recordings down the drain!!

 

[TheKrell]

Can't you back it up, encryption and all, to a spare drive or archive of some sort?

 

[digiblur]

I bet Ghost could back it up.

 

[IceToad]

I bet Ghost could back it up.

Agreed.

Also, you may want to try TrueImage from Acronis. It should be able to back up the raw partition to an image file as well.

 

[mikejstb]

I'll give them both a try tomorrow. Loosing all that stuff accumulated for so long would be a terrible drag.

 

[mike2154]

Let us know if you have any luck or what your results are for the rest of us who have not had to try to back them up yet.

 

[mikejstb]

I haven't gotten to try it yet. I thought I had another drive to back up to but it's in use. So I've got to get another one in.

Probably be end of the week.

 

[bob3]

While I am aware that this is an old thread, we have the same problem so I'm bumping it rather than clutter the board with another new thread covering the same topic.

We have the same problem; a bunch of hours worth of archived recordings on the standalone USB hard drive and the dumb receiver gave the same error message. (bogus and undeserved, I might add)
I had a spare 750GB SATA drive sitting here so just swapped out the drives in the enclosure but right now I'm trying to see if there is any way to recover said recordings.

We also had (on or about the same time - near the 4th week of January '08) a loss of our "custom guide" channel lists.
Was there some sort of new OS download that made widespread mischief or is our 2-month old new VIP622 receiver growing those dang gremlins in it like the old one did?
Anyone having suggestions, including "custom cuss words", magical incantations or related advice of where to look for/find more info on the above topics may feel free to email: divers3 AT surewest DOT net if they feel that posting said language may be a violation of the TOS.
I also have several distributions of Linux running here so hard core tweaking is something I'm not afraid of. :tux:

I managed to locate more info on our problem; now that I found out a little more of the terminology involved.
A search for "EHD" turned up a very pertinent post regarding bugs:

Software Version 6.16

and more specifically:
Pop-up message: "The EHD will need to be formatted and all information will be lost"

It looks like my best bet would be to either call & have the "EHD" re-flashed, and/or plug both drives into one of the ubuntu machines & copy the files from the "bad" drive to the "good" one.

I'll keep ya all posted as to which works.

 

[jpmarto]

Don't assume you can completely clone a hard drive.

On every hard drive there is a maintenance track (not accessible by the operating system), which has information about the device's serial number, bad sectors, sectors/tracks, etc. For example, if the disk says 63 sectors per track, that is really an average, the tracks on the outer tracks have more sectors, and the tracks closer to the center have fewer sectors (otherwise the bits on center sectors would too close to each other and overlap). Don't assume Ghost, or any other cloning software, will copy the maintenance data -- they don't. They work with the drive's logical content and merely copy from the absolute sector zero (MBR) to the last sector. If you image a drive, that's all you copy. If Dish receivers can access the maintenance track (and why shouldn't they?) they can easily determine if the disk is cloned and not original because unlike the OS, they can see the maintenance track and imbed ID data from the original physical device.

When using Ghost, if it sees a new clone, it asks you if you want to mark it. If you do, Ghost puts its license's serial number on the absolute second sector (following the MBR, the rest of the track is normally left empty). If you're doing a forensic clone, the serial number will change the MD5 and SHA1 hashes for forensic purposes (the original wouldn't have had a serial number in the second sector). Trust me on this, there is a reason images created by Ghost are inadmissable in court. No cloning or forensic software I work with (strong statement, so I humbly stand by to be contradicted) analyzes the maintenance track.

Bottom line: cloning software works independent of of hardware. That is why you can "Ghost" a hard drive from a Seagate to a Western Digital, or from a 20G to a 500G drive. Assume sophisticated systems can tell the difference from an original drive from a copied one. If your cloned drive doesn't work, there may be a good reason for it. As far as I know (please be gentle in educating me) there is no simple way to clone a drive content's and its maintenance track with off the shelf software.

As I edit this, another post has been posted ("Pepper"). I'm not editing to try to invalidate his comment, just to cover up that after all these decades I still can't write proper English grammer.

 

[Pepper]

Ghost worked for me when I tried it. The source and destination were the same brand and size though.

 

[Smith P.]

jpmarto, for forensic purpose you don't need the 'maintenance track' ( actually it is service area and sometimes it use more then one track) - there are no user data.
In forensic process you'll need gather inter-partition space, tail area and partitions.
There is a way to prevent Ghost from writing own IDs into sector#62, not the next to MBR, but on first _logical_ track.
I see you have some basic knowledge, but please don't go into HDD HW service , stay with logical sectors [LBA] and preserve user/OS [meta]data.

 

[jpmarto]

Hi P. Smith,

You are absolutely correct. The point I was trying to get across was that you can replicate an HD which will work, but you cannot hide the fact that the resulting working disk was copied because while the working clone may work perfectly, you can't easily replicate that the physical device it is on is not the the one it came from. I assume DN systems can take advantage of that fact.

My fault for not being clear enough.

I work with forensic software as part of my job, what I do I know is to make sure the MD5 and SHA1 hashes match. It doesn't matter onto which device i clone it to. I can use other software to ID the device it is currently copied to, so it follows that if I logged the device it came from I can determine the device it is on on wasn't the original.

I think we are factually agreeing with each other. I've made my point for SatGuys vis a vis cloning backup drives, so I'll drop any future responses as I don't want to seem argumentative (this a a great forum, but sometimes we tend to go off on tangents -- I'm among the worst offenders in that regard).

 

[Smith P.]

Your department could use "X-Ways Software Technology AG" software. Or perhaps already using it.

 

[BuddyBoy]

You guys are making this way more complicated than it needs to be.

Recordings on an EHD can easily be copied back and forth between different drives with simple Linux commands. You don't need to bother with any disk imaging tools unless you think you'll get done faster. Just let the receiver format the new disk, and then take your EHDs to a Linux system to copy the individual recordings you want copied.

I just copied eight recordings from one EHD to another and it worked fine (I checked by playing the new copies). I was careful to preserve permissions, ownership, and all three timestamps (create/modify/access), just to be safe. I also used the "touch" command to make sure the DishArc directory had the same modify time as the newest recording. For whatever reason my newest archived recordings had a modify time of around August 2008, even though I know they were recorded within the last month.

This works on my 622 but I don't believe it will work on a 211 as I've heard it maintains a catalog in the first partition (a 622 does not, there is nothing in the first ext3 partition).

 

[KKlare]

I think we are getting away from the basic problem that sometimes we get the message:
"The EHD will need to be formatted and all information will be lost"
and we need to fix it.

I have had this happen twice in the last 2 months especially with one recorder.
In one case the household key was different and that is what I attributed it to. But after the fix, keys for all mine (722/722/622) were changed but one 722 still differed in the last digit and they worked.

The fix: ASK FOR A HIT or rehit. It takes longer to get it set up than to have it done--about 10 minutes. You do not even need to reboot but you probably should not be recording. All recorders should be available to Dish.

In the later case, only the "bad" 722 had a problem. All the entries for the only Favorite list were gone with only the name still there. There may be a few other subtle changes. All recordings were then accessible and schedules and searches were still there.

It was important because I have 6 drives and use them on both 722s, switching often.

-Ken

 

[jdmacor]

Ok, so this may be overkill, but would something like the Drobo work? Or since it has two (or more) drives in the enclosure, would it not work as per the tech portal memo about external hard drives?

 

[whatchel1]

Unlikely

Ok, so this may be overkill, but would something like the Drobo work? Or since it has two (or more) drives in the enclosure, would it not work as per the tech portal memo about external hard drives?

It is unlikely to work in that it will since it may look like a RAID setup. Also when looking at it on the site it has little support for Linux OS. The E* systems don't do multiple HDD's in a setup. They will only work with 1 at a time.

 

[jdmacor]

It is unlikely to work in that it will since it may look like a RAID setup. Also when looking at it on the site it has little support for Linux OS. The E* systems don't do multiple HDD's in a setup. They will only work with 1 at a time.

Yeah, the Linux is only in beta.