I have a Western Digital External hard drive that has a ton of movies on it and as of a few weeks ago it quit showing up. I have tried everything I know to do to get it to show up again, but every time I connect it I get a message that says it needs to be formatted. Please, someone tell me there is something I haven't tried that will get me access to my movies again.
I'm new and I have a problem with my Western Digital External Hard Drive on a Hopper DVR
- Thread starter Hobbit42
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Hobbit42, you may be out of luck, because that disk may have died on you. One thing you might try is hooking it up to a computer running LIinux and see if Linux can repair the file system (ext3). If you don't have such a computer running full time, consider booting up a live DVD of your favorite distribution, fix the disk if possible, and then boot back into your regular O/S.
to Satelliteguys Hobbit42!It looks like I'm out of luck. I don't think it died, but after running fsck on all of the partitions (which didn't find any errors, damn-it!) it is still doing the same thing. Literally over 100 movies *poof* gone! But I'm still not quite ready to reformat it. If anyone has ANY other suggestions, I'm willing to try it.
WOO-HOO! Success! OK, so I have been retired for four years and it has been six years since I was a UNIX system administrator. We used SUN equipment with Solaris software so I'm not that familiar with Linux, but it occurred to me that there may be a flag or two that needed to be set when I ran fsck on the drive. So I looked up the flags available with the command, added some of them, they found and fixed some issues with the superblock and when I plugged in the drive to the receiver, SUCCESS! The drive was recognized and all of my movies were there! Thank you "THEKrell" for starting me down the right path!
Everyone have a great day. I know mine just got a LOT better!
Everyone have a great day. I know mine just got a LOT better!
A long time ago I thought one could copy the files (recordings) off a drive, reformat it on the receiver, and then copy the files back onto it. It has been a long time since I looked at the folder and file structure on the external drive, but I thought it was fairly straightforward.
There is a hardware diagnostic check built into hard drives called SMART Disk Drive SMART Status that can evaluate the health of your drive. I would not trust a drive even though it seems to work fine now without knowing the SMART status of the drive. You can download a free copy of the Belarc Advisor for home use and it will show the SMART status.
That information could be useful to others in the future. Thanks for posting the outcome.
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