I did a quick search and didn’t see anyone talking about actually being able to repair a file system once they start getting the ‘drive must be formatted’ error so I wanted to post my experience.
A couple days ago I started having problems with video playback on my 750GB external hard drive attached to my 622. I would try to start a show and it would immediately kick me back to the menu. I could power off and on my external drive and then it would start working again. I had done that about 5 times and then I started getting the popup error message stating that I needed to reformat my hard drive in order to access it.
I tried rebooting my receiver and attaching my HD to a different USB port but no matter what I did it wanted to reformat the drive. Figuring all was lost I decided to connect it to my PC and take a look at the file structure to see if there was any way to get my shows off. I found the other thread about using ubuntu linux to copy the files off the drive so launched a linux VM (using free VMware Server) running kubuntu and connected my USB drive to that.
It showed three partitions on the drive /dev/sdb1, /dev/sdb2/ and /dev/sdb3. I was able to browse the directory structure on /dev/sdb1 and /dev/sdb3 without any problems but when I tried to mount /dev/sdb2 I got a bunch of errors stating that the directory structure was unreadable and it couldn’t be mounted.
That partition was 500GB so I figured that was where my videos were stored. I kicked off a linux file system repair utility ‘e2fsck’ and pointed it at that partition. It reported that there were errors in the file table so I let it run for several hours to scan and repair the partition. Once the repair was done I was able to mount that partition and see all of the video folders under the dish archive directory.
After that I reconnected the drive to the DVR it came I was able to access my videos again without any problems. I haven’t tested all of them yet but I wanted to post this so that people would know that they may have an option to get some of their recorded content back if their errors were caused by the same issue as mine. I’ll try to add to this post a little later with a step by step of the process I went through when I get more time.
At the same time in hopes that someone from Dish might actually read this <RANT> If you’re going to port over an open source file system to use on your DVR, why not take the extra time and do the same thing with the file systems native repair utilities? I’m paying to ‘enable’ this feature why can’t you throw me a bone and embed the file system repair utility on the dvr so that the slightest hint of file table corruption doesn’t force me to format the drive and loose all my content? </RANT>
Thanks,
-Matt
A couple days ago I started having problems with video playback on my 750GB external hard drive attached to my 622. I would try to start a show and it would immediately kick me back to the menu. I could power off and on my external drive and then it would start working again. I had done that about 5 times and then I started getting the popup error message stating that I needed to reformat my hard drive in order to access it.
I tried rebooting my receiver and attaching my HD to a different USB port but no matter what I did it wanted to reformat the drive. Figuring all was lost I decided to connect it to my PC and take a look at the file structure to see if there was any way to get my shows off. I found the other thread about using ubuntu linux to copy the files off the drive so launched a linux VM (using free VMware Server) running kubuntu and connected my USB drive to that.
It showed three partitions on the drive /dev/sdb1, /dev/sdb2/ and /dev/sdb3. I was able to browse the directory structure on /dev/sdb1 and /dev/sdb3 without any problems but when I tried to mount /dev/sdb2 I got a bunch of errors stating that the directory structure was unreadable and it couldn’t be mounted.
That partition was 500GB so I figured that was where my videos were stored. I kicked off a linux file system repair utility ‘e2fsck’ and pointed it at that partition. It reported that there were errors in the file table so I let it run for several hours to scan and repair the partition. Once the repair was done I was able to mount that partition and see all of the video folders under the dish archive directory.
After that I reconnected the drive to the DVR it came I was able to access my videos again without any problems. I haven’t tested all of them yet but I wanted to post this so that people would know that they may have an option to get some of their recorded content back if their errors were caused by the same issue as mine. I’ll try to add to this post a little later with a step by step of the process I went through when I get more time.
At the same time in hopes that someone from Dish might actually read this <RANT> If you’re going to port over an open source file system to use on your DVR, why not take the extra time and do the same thing with the file systems native repair utilities? I’m paying to ‘enable’ this feature why can’t you throw me a bone and embed the file system repair utility on the dvr so that the slightest hint of file table corruption doesn’t force me to format the drive and loose all my content? </RANT>
Thanks,
-Matt
