Why does Dreambox think an empty hard disk is full?

[Dog's dinner]

A new factory reset (about 5 in fact today) because clicking on setup>harddisk caused the Dreambox to flash its green screen ("sorry, software problem") and reboot. At first I thought the factory reset flash (in the pan in my case) was corrupt. Checking the 'information' tab, however, provided the following information:

Harddisk (ATA-WDC WD15EADS-00S)
Capacity:	1500.301 GB
Free:	-1 MB

Since it's been impossible to "initialize" the hard drive (with or without mountpoints, which the Dreambox instructions say nothing about by the way), I had to try and approach the issue from the computer end.

I therefore telnetted the command:
unmount /hddmkfs.ext /dev/ide/host0/bus0/target0/lun0/part1then

mount /dev/ide/host0/bus0/target0/lun0/part1
mkdir /hdd/movie

Didn't work though. The device (dreambox control centre) returned a "not found" message on each of the four commands.

I'll remove the hard drive tomorrow, connect it to a computer and see if I can format it - or at least see what's on it. None of my recordings are there anymore, they're long gone.

(I'm going to press the 'submit new thread' link once, and not touch the computer til tomorrow in case the page freezes again :-)

 

[Dog's dinner]

Update: I removed the hard drive from the Dreambox and installed it on a computer. Apart from not having a drive name (letter) Windows disk manager gave it a clean bill of health. Installed back into the Dreambox, clicked on Hard disk in setup/system, and the green screen of "I'm giving up again" appeared. Removed said hard drive and replaced with a velociraptor - only 300 GBs against the previous 1.5TBs, but useful for the purposes of the test.

This time the Dreambox didn't go potty. It recognized the hard drive and successfully "initialised" it. I'm constantly asked during these initialisation rituals if I want to have a mount point. I have absolutely no preference one way or the other. So I choose yes and no alternately.

There's one remaining problem (not strictly true, but who's arguing?), and that's telling the Dreambox what the default recording location is, At the moment it thinks it's on the onboard flash, at a place called [onboad flash]/hdd/. Now there's an option to choose the default recording path in the setup/system menu. Unfortunately, it doesn't allow you to input anything, such as a location path. You can delete a bookmark (if you've got one), you can say OK to what you've already got (i.e. in my case the wrong path), and of course you can cancel the whole operation. It doesn't matter what you do, the option is useless. Perhaps one needs a keyboard or something.

At present I'm trying to see whether it can be done via the eupemistically called dreambox control centre (which I'm beginning to like, believe it or not). Anyone know what the telnet command is to install the latest dreambox update? I'm still pretty sure that some of the problems lie with a faulty factory reset file.

If this hard drive test hadn't worked, the Dreambox would have been on its way back to the shop in Denmark for an overhaul.

It just struck me that the problem with the hard drive may have been Barry Allen's attempt to install itself there. The installation log reported failure, but since it wiped out all the recordings in the process of failing, I suppose the mess it left was something the Dreambox software couldn't fix.

 

[oldfart]

1. find your hard disk (or cf/usb)
fdisk -l (thats a lowercase L)

root@dm8000:~# fdisk -l

Disk /dev/sda: 500.1 GB, 500107862016 bytes
255 heads, 63 sectors/track, 60801 cylinders
Units = cylinders of 16065 * 512 = 8225280 bytes

Device Boot      Start         End      Blocks  Id System
/dev/sda1               1       60801   488384032  83 Linux

you can mount the drive using the mount command

mount /dev/sda1 /media/hdd

or edit the file /etc/fstab

/dev/sda1            /media/hdd           auto       defaults              0 0

 

[Dog's dinner]

Thanks oldfart (!), just the sort of help one needs, practical and to the point.

Yesterday evening, after resetting again to factory standards, I decided not to ftp my settings, just to see if the machine worked better. Instead I downloaded the channels via the conventional route, built up my favourites and even managed to record a couple of programmes. Apart from siezing up once, the dreambox behaved itself nicely. The lesson being, don't upload an old settings file, because you'll be uploading the old problems as well.

Today I thought I see whether yesterday's good behaviour meant that I could install Barry Allen on a cf card. Before trying, though, I removed the hard drive. Didn't want everything wiped clean again.

The telnet operation couldn't however, find a device to install BA on.

I've replaced the old (1.5 T hard drive, and tried mounting it using your command string, oldfart. It returned the message: can't find /dev/sda1/media/hdd in etc/fstab.

You mention editing the fstab file. I tried accessing the file via a telnet command /etc/fstab, but was denied permission. So I opened it in Notebook. I'm copying out the code here:

#automatically edited by enigma2, Mon, 09 Jan 2012 23:36:38
rootfs / auto defaults 1 1
proc /proc proc defaults 0 0
devpts /dev/pts devpts mode=0620,gid=5 0 0
usbfs /proc/bus/usb usbfs defaults 0 0
/dev/mtdblock2 /boot jffs2 ro 0 0
tmpfs /var tmpfs defaults 0 0
tmpfs /tmp tmpfs defaults 0 0
/dev/disk/by-uuid/e1cdf5ab-0346-4850-b014-b9327d08f548 /media/hdd noauto defaults 0 0
/dev/disk/by-uuid/415c8b73-701a-4a7c-bebb-4b86e447d233 /media/hdd noauto defaults 0 0
/dev/disk/by-uuid/56366435-fda7-4f1a-9cc9-1130eff042fc /media/hdd noauto defaults 0 0
/dev/disk/by-uuid/30FC72FDFC72BD22 /media/WDC WD3000HLFS-0 noauto defaults 0 0
/dev/disk/by-uuid/95fa9ae6-cb62-43f1-9ac0-0f65c46f3b0e /media/hdd noauto defaults 0 0

Where your code has "auto", this code seems to have "noauto". I don't see the sda1 anywhere either.

I'm gradually building up a small file of "how tos" for later use. Where d'you pick up all this knowledge about codes and programming?

Anyway, cheers for now.

Bought a new card reader today. See if it works better than yesterday's