Repairing an EHD

[TheKrell]

I suffered the disappearance of my 6TB Seagate on my H3 a few months ago. The old/original H3 was replaced without fixing that, but an older EHD from my 612 days worked fine on the "new" H3. So I decided there was something amiss with my 6TB Seagate and I attempted to repair it. I successfully did rebuild an EHD with a bad partition on my 722, but alas I had no luck this morning on this Seagate.

First I tried to boot up Alma Linux on this computer. Kernel panic! Boo hiss on new hardware requirements of the latest Linux distributions. So I fell back to Scientific Linux 7.9 and that booted up fine. There were 13 ext3 partitions on the Seagate. The first was 1GB and presumably contains encryption keys and possibly an index to the 12 500GB partitions. All partitions were healthy except for the 3rd, which would not mount. I tried fsck and there was a lot of repairs going on but it still wouldn't mount. So I tried a Gnome tool and that didn't work either.

So I gave up on that partition and reformatted it with the same volume ID as the other 500GB partitions, which is "Linux filesystem". That made all partitions mountable using Linux. Back on the "new" H3 and it is again AWOL. I tried unplugging it (no pop-up) and plugging it back in again and it wanted to format the disk. I said "No" to that. From noises, I know that something has been going on for the last hour, but still the disk will not show up. The only thing I can think of doing is deleting the partition and seeing if it will work with 11 500GB paritions, all of which so far as I can tell, are still good and still contain hundreds of programs.

Any other ideas?

 

[navychop]

Abandon all hope.

Really.

I've had a few EHDs suddenly become unusable with my H3. All at the same time. Not corrupted disks. Some are RAID disks. Some correspondence with BG at Dish solved nothing and petered out.

It's DISH! They've goofed up and somehow lost the ability to deal with a variety of EHDs. Ones that are large enough. And recent enough. No reason for the loss given. Major reason for me staying with Dish - gone.

I considered copying to a brand new larger disk. But I lost the directions and the expectation of any success. Your post just reinforces my suspicion it would be a lost cause. I'm sure if I looked, I'd find those directions on this site, if Search works well.

BTW - if you do any email correspondence with Dish - COPY or at least screen print everything. Such records have a way of disappearing…..

 

[Yespage]

Sounds like something on the initial partition is the issue. Hard drive could be hunky dory, but an important file that H3 handshakes with might have become corrupted.

 

[Strega]

It's been a while since I've looked at my EHDs in Linux, but I thought every one of them had a weird unmountable partition on them. No movies were stored in them so I just ignored them. Copying files between readable partitions and ignoring the weird ones worked for me.

 

[TheKrell]

It's been a while since I've looked at my EHDs in Linux, but I thought every one of them had a weird unmountable partition on them. No movies were stored in them so I just ignored them. Copying files between readable partitions and ignoring the weird ones worked for me.

Yeah, it worked for me too when this same thing happened on my 1.5TB disk on a 722. I simply repaired the bum partition and the 722 mounted it just fine. IIRC the bad partition was empty and I saved all my recordings, with possibly a few lost and gone forever. Back then as now all partitions were ext3 and the file system was mountable and the filenames were readable. The programs weren't playable of course because the programs are encrypted. But in principle (for navy), I could move these to another 6TB disk just by (1) formatting the new disk with the H3 and (2) copying the Disharc folder on each partition from old to new. There are 13 ext3 partitions on my Seagate: 1GB followed by 12 500GB partitions each with a lone Disharc (sp?) folder. Ah yes. I reformatted that bum partition and there is probably no DishArc folder on it. I will endeavor to fix that oversight and see if the disk then shows up. If not, I'll sacrifice 500GB and delete that partition and see if that works. I'm pigheaded about stuff like this, and I am not throwing in the towel until I'm completely out of ideas.

 

[Strega]

It wouldn't surprise me if one malformed cat file might confuse the hopper enough to give up on the disk. If so, the good news is that you would be able to copy everything but one corrupted show - IF you could figure out which one that is. I have grepped cat files in order to organize shows across multiple disks, but I've never tried to verify the contents/structure of them.

You could do it by trial and error I guess. ie: copy some shows. Works? OK copy some more... Repeat... Stopped working? Backup a step.

 

[TheKrell]

It wouldn't surprise me if one malformed cat file might confuse the hopper enough to give up on the disk. If so, the good news is that you would be able to copy everything but one corrupted show - IF you could figure out which one that is. I have grepped cat files in order to organize shows across multiple disks, but I've never tried to verify the contents/structure of them.

It's a little late for that! I gave up trying to repair the file system on that partition and just reformatted it. So however many programs will fit in 500GB is how many programs I lost. I think the Hopper fills up partitions in order, so the bad one was the 2nd so I believe it was completely full and is now completely empty.

I did rediscover the file ownership and protection problem I found doing this for my 722 EHD... The partition has a volume ID I made up myself, and that was wrong. It should have been a bunch of alphanumeric characters which I didn't find elsewhere such as on the 1st 1GB partition. (Maybe the filenames made them invisible and I needed to ls -la to see them.) And it was owned by Live User or some such nonsense. I changed that back to the correct root:root. Then I copied the DIshArc folder (and contents) from one empty partition to my newly reformatted partition, just to insure that a missing DishArc folder, even when empty, doesn't cause the Hopper to ignore the whole disk. None of those fixes did anything; I still see no 6TB disk appear when I plug it in.

I think this would have worked had the disk been on a 722. Hmmm. I still have that owned 722, but it's been unplugged for years.

 

[Strega]

I was thinking the bad cat file is in one of the good partitions that you copied over - thus explaining (POSSIBLY) why it still wasn't being recognized. Although, if this is the same disk that it isn't recognizing now, maybe it doesn't like the way that partition was repaired. Then again, maybe having the same files in two partitions is yet another way to confuse it - just thinking out loud.

When I got my Hopper3 (18 months ago I think) I wanted to create a bunch of new drives with the shows grouped more logically than they had accumulated over ~15 years with the 722. I let the Hopper format each new disk so I didn't have to worry about partition details, and then I copied certain shows (based on their titles in the cat files) to one new disk, and then other shows to another new disk. The hopper accepted all these new completely rearranged disks without complaint, so it's reasonably flexible about having files moved around, but I'm sure there are specific ways to get it confused.

So, I think what I would do would be like: Get a new disk. Let it format. Then copy one partition at a time and check after each copy. - Except the repaired/rebuilt partition. If it stops recognizing after some partition, then something is wrong in there, but all the others may be usable.