I have a 2TB EHD connected to my Wally; I think it's starting to fail. Is there any way to connect the "new" EHD to the 2nd USB port and transfer the recordings over so I don't lose them all?
Transfer EHD recordings to new drive with Wally?
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Wally/ViP211/Vip411 are the stepchildren of DVR's. Only one drive may be attached at a time AFAIK. Way back when the 211 first came out there was a discussion about cloning the drive on these machines with Ghost, Acronis or some other software that does bit by bit copying.
Another method was to create a second drive (hopefully a new piece of hardware) and connect both to a linux computer and copy the programs manually from the Dish ARC folder on the old drive to the DishARC folder on the new drive.
I don't even remember if it was on Satelliteguys.us or the "other" place, but I believe it was done by the user PSmith, but it has been probably 7-8 years so details have faded.
Another method was to create a second drive (hopefully a new piece of hardware) and connect both to a linux computer and copy the programs manually from the Dish ARC folder on the old drive to the DishARC folder on the new drive.
I don't even remember if it was on Satelliteguys.us or the "other" place, but I believe it was done by the user PSmith, but it has been probably 7-8 years so details have faded.
Buy a hardware RAID 1 enclosure. Put as near identical HDD in it as you can. Put your "failing" drive in it also. Power it up. Sleep on it. With luck, in the morning, you will have a usable clone.
I like this idea but... I've never personally used a raid 1 enclosure that did that. Always the first step is to format both drives. Do you have some recommendations on enclosures for which this definitely works?
yep, one of the members on this forum taught me how to do that with a Linux boot disk. was hoping there might be something a bit easier nowadays
Yeah, PSmith and I had worked out the geeky details on cloning the EHD for our ViP 211 receivers. I was able to successfully transfer my recordings from a 250 GB bare drive I had used with a USB Drive cable (3.5" EIDE, 2.5" EIDE, and SATA) to a Western Digital 750 GB desktop enclosure. I used Knoppix originally, but now I like using my MacPro running Ubuntu as it has internal drive bays I can put the drives in and transfer at SATA speeds.
The key is to allow the 211/411/Wally to format the new drive first, then it can be recognized by the Linux system. Make all copies as root. Using the Ubuntu Boot CD/DVD in evaluation mode lets you do this via the GUI and drag-n-drop:
"My 211 DVR function is activated:" #215
...of the first and third EXT3 partitions using Linux (I use a CD-ROM-based Linux called Knoppix) from the original drive to the new, larger drive.
Over a year ago, I had done this using a Knoppix CD for both the 211 EHD and 622 EHD (not between the two; that doesn't work). I wanted to...
I used Knoppix years ago to do exactly this when I upgraded from a 500 GB EHD to a 1 TB EHD on my 622. Format the new EHD with your ViP DVR first...
and lastly, the most recent time:
ViP 211 Warning 981
The key is to allow the 211/411/Wally to format the new drive first, then it can be recognized by the Linux system. Make all copies as root. Using the Ubuntu Boot CD/DVD in evaluation mode lets you do this via the GUI and drag-n-drop:
"My 211 DVR function is activated:" #215
...of the first and third EXT3 partitions using Linux (I use a CD-ROM-based Linux called Knoppix) from the original drive to the new, larger drive.
Over a year ago, I had done this using a Knoppix CD for both the 211 EHD and 622 EHD (not between the two; that doesn't work). I wanted to...
I used Knoppix years ago to do exactly this when I upgraded from a 500 GB EHD to a 1 TB EHD on my 622. Format the new EHD with your ViP DVR first...
and lastly, the most recent time:
ViP 211 Warning 981
I have three RAID 1 enclosures. Most decent enclosures should work.
I'm very happy with the Vantec 3.5" SATA to USB 3.0 enclosure, and its predecessors.
Make sure it is HARDWARE RAID and (I think all) has RAID 1 as an option. There used to be some s/w RAID but I haven't seen any in some time.
Now, if it needs formatting, just plug the enclosure in to the Dish receiver with the one new drive in it and let it fly. I have only put two drives in such an enclosure and formatted them together. The only time I needed to clone a drive, it was a Windows drive and I don't recall needing a format. I think the enclosure just did that as part of the copy process. But my memory could be wrong. Just ask my wife....
Actually, you can transfer your recordings from one disk to another. I just expanded my 1TB drive almost full, to a 4TB Drive.
I plugged the new drive into the Wally, and got it all set to go, with no recordings or timers on it.
I loaded VMWare Player 16 on my laptop, and loaded the Linux ISO for Ubuntu Version 20.04. When building the machine, I increased the VM disk size from 20GB to 50GB, to be sure to have enough room to transfer the files for the 25GB segment. Upon running the VM, I let it do the updates it asked for, then rebooted it. This is fairly important, as I faltered a few times, with bad information on how to get root access to the files on the disk.
There are two partitions on the Wally DVR, a small 25GB partition, and the remainder of the disk. The larger partition holds all the data for each recording or group of recordings in 3 files, es1.bm, es1.tsp, es1.wtt, where the video is in the .tsp file, judging from the size. My disk went up to es432.bm, tsp & wtt.
Mount both USB drives in your virtual machine. and copy all of the large partition files from the old drive to the new. Delete any files on the new drive before doing that. My 1TB disk took over 24 hours to do that.
Look into the 25GB partition, and copy all of your old JPEGs in the file folder 'persistent_graphics' from old to new, ignore any error messages, you should end up with the same images in the folder on both hard drives.
I did this one disk at a time, copied the folder contents into new folders in My Documents in the Virtual Machine, then swapped disks and copied the individual files into the folders already on the new larger disk. Linux didn't like copying the folders, so this last attempt I just picked out the files, and ignored any error messages.
Then locate the folder called 'databases', and copy the 5 database files from old drive to new, after deleting the new database files.
I was just guessing, but that was all it took to get the old recordings on the new drive.
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