Try rebooting the Hopper with the EHD plugged in and powered. If that doesn't work, unplug/replug the EHD from the Hopper after the reboot.
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External Hard Drive Limitations for Hopper
- Thread starter jwestpfahl
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Try rebooting the Hopper with the EHD plugged in and powered. If that doesn't work, unplug/replug the EHD from the Hopper after the reboot.
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Just reporting back that this method works fine for copying/moving recordings between devices. I copied about 1TB and all transferred recordings appears to be accessible on this drive.
What was wrong with my post #37? http://www.satelliteguys.us/threads...-Limitations-for-Hopper?p=3105579#post3105579
I didn't mean to slight you. I appreciate your timely response. It was right on and you were the first to suggest how to do this. Thank you! I was in a hurry and quoting two posts from my iPad was complicated.
This did not work. I suspect this issue (not completing the format) is linked with how this USB bridge behaves. Although the drive/enclosure does appear to work when connected to my desktop, I have found something that is different between this "home assembled" EHD and the WD My Book EHD. The drive I'm attempting to get working uses 4K sectors, however the USB bridge reports the sector size of the device as 512 bytes. The WD My Book reports 4096 sectors for both the drive and the device. 512 byte sectors result in (8x) larger logical block address (LBA) values vs 4K sectors. I wonder if there may be some threshold which is being crossed that the hopper does not accomodate. It appears to be get triggered when the last 135GB partition is being created. The partition record created by the hopper has some strange data within. The LBA values for this last partition would have a Start and End value at 5.2 and 5.8 billion respectively. The previous partitions used values progressing upto 5.2 billion and they appear to be operational. I'm not familiar with any numerical computer thresholds that occur between those two values. Perhaps someone with more Dish HW technical knowledge does.
I think something is wrong with your Hopper. You mentioned earlier it can take 10 hours to do the 1am update ... It shouldn't take longer than 15 minutes, ever. I have had two Hoppers for 9 months... No 1am update has taken close to am hour, let alone 10.
If you leave the USB cable connected to a disk, the time to do a reboot file system check can be very long, hours.
It is best to remove the USB or turn the power off the drive to avoid this. It can easily miss an overnight recording.
This was true of the VIP recorders, too. The time taken should be proportional to the EHD size and number of files.
As there is no way to report back to you the corruption nor does it fix anything AFAIK, it seems a waste of time.
-Ken
It is best to remove the USB or turn the power off the drive to avoid this. It can easily miss an overnight recording.
This was true of the VIP recorders, too. The time taken should be proportional to the EHD size and number of files.
As there is no way to report back to you the corruption nor does it fix anything AFAIK, it seems a waste of time.
-Ken
Ext3fs is a journaled file system and it is expressly designed to have a shorter fsck. It replays uncommitted transactions from the journal which greatly increases the speed and minimizes the likelihood of a data loss.
See previous re: ext3fs. Depending on how they have their startup sequences set up, it can easily bypass the external drives until after they have brought the rest of the system up. That's exactly how I would do it, so that the external drives are delayed from availability but most normal operations are functioning.
man fsck.
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Found the problem with the "home assembled" EHD
I reported yesterday the USB bridge in EHD I assembled was reporting 512 byte sectors instead of the drive's native 4K sectors. In addition to performance issues with non-sector aligned I/O operations, the smaller sector size produces 8x larger logical block addresses for the same size partitions. For this 3TB drive, this change caused the start of the 8th partition to have a LBA > 2^32. The MSDOS partition table does not support starting address beyond 32 bits, so the format on the hopper appeared to get stuck in loop when trying to write value into the partition table. Armed with this info I'm trying a few experiments. First, since the 7th partition started just below the 2^32 limit, I decided to make it bigger consuming the remainder of the space on the drive. After formatting and attaching the hopper, it didn't like and wanted to reformat. I'm in the process of partitioning the drive with a GPT rather than a MSDOS partition table. GPT has been supported in Linux a long time, so I'm hoping the hopper will support it as well. It will be a little while before I can try this. I'll report back my findings.
I reported yesterday the USB bridge in EHD I assembled was reporting 512 byte sectors instead of the drive's native 4K sectors. In addition to performance issues with non-sector aligned I/O operations, the smaller sector size produces 8x larger logical block addresses for the same size partitions. For this 3TB drive, this change caused the start of the 8th partition to have a LBA > 2^32. The MSDOS partition table does not support starting address beyond 32 bits, so the format on the hopper appeared to get stuck in loop when trying to write value into the partition table. Armed with this info I'm trying a few experiments. First, since the 7th partition started just below the 2^32 limit, I decided to make it bigger consuming the remainder of the space on the drive. After formatting and attaching the hopper, it didn't like and wanted to reformat. I'm in the process of partitioning the drive with a GPT rather than a MSDOS partition table. GPT has been supported in Linux a long time, so I'm hoping the hopper will support it as well. It will be a little while before I can try this. I'll report back my findings.
I agree this would be ideal, but finding an enclosure that reports the actual sector size has proved to be a challenge. This subtle characteristic is not a detail normally included in the enclosure's literature.
Using GPT vs MSDOS partition tables
As you might have expected, my experiment using GPT was not completely successful. The hopper tolerated a drive formatted this way (it didn't ask to reformat), but it also showed 0 space available on the drive. So atm this appears to be a dead end. I'll report back if I come up with any other ideas to try to get a large (>2.2TB) drive with 512 byte sectors to function. Based on my findings, I'm reasonable sure that much larger drives can be attached to the hopper. As long as the drive and enclosure use and report native 4K sectors, I think the new upper limit will follow this formula: sectorSize * 2^32. With 4K sectors, the new limit should be 16TB. Hopefully before drives that big are available and affordable, Dish will have upgraded the hopper to allow > 999 recordings per drive, enhance how the drives are initialized (more advanced partitioning OR bigger partitions) and utilize USB 3.0. Thank you all for input and suggestions.
As you might have expected, my experiment using GPT was not completely successful. The hopper tolerated a drive formatted this way (it didn't ask to reformat), but it also showed 0 space available on the drive. So atm this appears to be a dead end. I'll report back if I come up with any other ideas to try to get a large (>2.2TB) drive with 512 byte sectors to function. Based on my findings, I'm reasonable sure that much larger drives can be attached to the hopper. As long as the drive and enclosure use and report native 4K sectors, I think the new upper limit will follow this formula: sectorSize * 2^32. With 4K sectors, the new limit should be 16TB. Hopefully before drives that big are available and affordable, Dish will have upgraded the hopper to allow > 999 recordings per drive, enhance how the drives are initialized (more advanced partitioning OR bigger partitions) and utilize USB 3.0. Thank you all for input and suggestions.
4TB EHD
Just tried a 4TB drive attached to my hopper. Sadly, the format never ended. I did not attach the drive to my desktop in an attempt to diagnose the issue. I suspect this size drive exceeded the max number of allowed partitions and as seen earlier the hopper will try endlessly to completely fill a drive even if it results in an endless loop. Until something changes a 3TB drive seems to be the current upper limit.
Just tried a 4TB drive attached to my hopper. Sadly, the format never ended. I did not attach the drive to my desktop in an attempt to diagnose the issue. I suspect this size drive exceeded the max number of allowed partitions and as seen earlier the hopper will try endlessly to completely fill a drive even if it results in an endless loop. Until something changes a 3TB drive seems to be the current upper limit.
When I tried this, the Linux said I didn't have permission to copy. Any help with this, I used Knoppix Linux.
Sorry, I'm no Linux expert, and was just regurgitating info that I read elsewhere. I think it has to do with file ownership and logging in as root. Try this post for starters:
http://www.satelliteguys.us/threads...en-archiving-and-a-copy?p=3024669#post3024669
I have finally been able to get my Hopper to recognize my Seagate Expansion Desktop 3 TB (STB3000100) USB 3.0 external hard drive. Out of the box, I had tried it on my 722k but it would not format the drive. I waited until I received my Hopper and Hopper/Sling before trying again. Both Hoppers would not recognized the drive after reformatting on my MacBook.
I read on the board to using GParted Live cd to format the disk to ext3 format. After about 1.5 hours of formatting the drive finished. I plugged it into my Hopper/Sling and was successful in it recognizing the drive. I guess the key is if it does not just recognize and format the drive, format it yourself with GParted.
I read on the board to using GParted Live cd to format the disk to ext3 format. After about 1.5 hours of formatting the drive finished. I plugged it into my Hopper/Sling and was successful in it recognizing the drive. I guess the key is if it does not just recognize and format the drive, format it yourself with GParted.
