Crash problem with P+ and USB hdd

mumblecake

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I am using a 1TB WD USB hdd with my P+ and so far had little problems with this set up. It occasionally happened after a power cut (which are far too frequent) that the hard drive wouldn't connect. I would than run scan disk on that hard drive with my windows computer which wouldn't find any problems but afterwards the hard drive would magically connect again to my P+. Same thing happened this week again. After running scan disk the hard drive would indeed connect again but would show a number of rogue entries. These would just have random characters as a name and when you select them the additional info area (which usually gives transponder/frequency of where it was recorded) would say "file not found". It was not possible to delete these entries from within the P+. I then looked through the folders of the disk on my win computer and deleted all folders which contained only one file (a properly recorded program consists of a folder with at least three files). I also defragmented the drive while I was on it as it was running really slowly. Now I have the following problem. The hard drive connects to the P+. I can also record to the hard drive but whenever I open the playlist after some time of scanning the disk the whole box crashes and reboots (loader v1.5 showing on the front ... a proper reboot). I first thought it might have had to do with silly windows creating a hidden folder for the recycle bin so I deleted that on shell level with my linux laptop ... the problem persists. I have run various disk utilities on win and linux to no avail. I wondered if any of you have come across a similar problem and if there is anything I could try before considering to wipe the drive?
 

Topper

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Well it is only an educated guess but I would suspect because you have deleted files and directories through windows and not your stb your stb index and playlist thinks they are still there hence the crash when trying to read the playlist. Not really sure how to proceed there unless there is a re-indexing routine within the stb software.
 

mumblecake

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Topper said:
Well it is only an educated guess but I would suspect because you have deleted files and directories through windows and not your stb your stb index and playlist thinks they are still there hence the crash when trying to read the playlist. Not really sure how to proceed there unless there is a re-indexing routine within the stb software.

That would make sense if there was something like an index file on the hard drive. This is however not the case. There are no hidden files anywhere and there are also no files in the core directory. This assumption is also backed up by the fact that the stb is scanning the drive every time you open the play back menu (which took about a minute lately).

I personally doubt that this is the reason
 

mumblecake

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I'm fairly certain that I found the solution which turns out to be fairly interesting (and sort of disturbing) and I shall contact Fortec Star support about it.

The problem was that several things changed at once and I just assumed that me deleting programs was the cause. It turns out that before I deleted the rogue programs a few more programs had recorded. After deleting the rubbish entries there were 258 recorded programs left ... a lot of them only 10 min programs like Thomas the tank engine, Chuggington, etc.

I deleted 2 and brought it down to 256 recorded programs and it started working. ... Box has an 8Bit integer to count the number of programs ... overflow that and the box will crash.

I tested it quite thoroughly but would be glad if someone could try to confirm this.

Anyway ... box working again without completely wiping the hard drive. Will add that to briangw's thread of hidden features as a hidden limitation.
 

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I regularly connect my USB HDD to my PC and tidy up the various bits of debris left lying around by the P+ firmware - as you say lots of odd folders with a single 0 byte file in it, or multiple versions of the Timeshift folder . So I dont think this is the cause of your problems. Have you tried connecting another USB HDD to the P+ to see where the fault lies ie P+ or HDD.

As far as I can tell, the HDD can hold any number of non-P+ folders and they will be ignored. The 'scan' process just seems to look for folders containing a TS, IDX and INF files with the same name as the folder name. So I dont think any Windows system folders should cause any problems.

I would copy off any 'complete' and wanted folders to your PC, full-format the drive, and copy the required folders back on. If there is an apparent hardware issue on the HDD, you could try creating 2 partitions so that the P+ doesnt try to access the bad part. I aasume you know the partition has to be FAT32, but the other could be NTFS if you want.


EDIT I have just spotted your other post - are you now saying its the 256 recording limit that is causing the problem ? If it is you could copy all the non-urgent ones onto a second partition as a work-around.!
 
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