Ubuntu Linux can't mount a 2tb eSATA 3

[oldbamaguy]

Well I finally got Ubuntu Linux up and running in a dual boot setup on my PC.
I had to use a USB keyboard.
Anyhow I didn't seem to be able to shut down Ubuntu.
I tried the help but never saw the shutdown command.
Anyhow why I was trying Ubuntu was to "see" the data on my DirecTV eSATA. It's a WD20EADS in a Antec MX-1 and I was connected using the USB cable. Ubuntu said it could not mount a 16 gb filesystem. Unknown device it said. The WD20EADS is a 2 tb storage unit.
Your suggestions, please.
TYVM!!

 

[oldbamaguy]

A Post Script:
After going back to DBSTALK and searching their archives I found the solution to the "dirty block" problem.
Apparently I did an UN graceful shutdown.
DirecTV HD-DVRs do some things when in the "off" position.
Just unplugging the eSATA, I guess interupts the real time writings to the eSATA in "off".
This results in a "dirty block" as far as Linux is concerned. A lot of this problem was discussed on DBSTALK a few years back (when eSATA was taking hold?). There is a special procedure for doing a "graceful shutdown" -
Interrupting a manual system reset at just the right point
(which sure seems Un graceful) is the way to get a graceful shutdown.
So I am now thinking that if I don't want to admit defeat I could do a graceful shutdown on one of my eSATAs and see.
Doing a graceful shutdown will require that I am feeling "really frisky".
I'll bet that less than .5% of DirecTV users can do a graceful shutdown.
A purposed DirecTV survey -
How do you do a "graceful shutdown" of a eSATA?
Response to survey:
50% don't know
47% turn it off
2.9% unplug it

I am told that the percentage of eSATA users at DirecTV is quite low anyway.
And it took me a week just to get to the "dirty block" point. More searching of the archive before starting would have saved you and me a lot of time. I don't really have anything better to do than babble here, and I am sure that YOU DO.
Once again let me apologize for taking the time of you "technical folks".
I guess I'm more of a "NON Technical User", but that wasn't one of the choices.
Best Wishes Always!!
ed

 

[flyboytim]

Files or systems are dirty when they have not been cleanly shut down. I used to code Clipper databases, and the first thing any database application I wrote did was to check if the database files were closed cleanly. If they were not, all the indexes were rebuilt so that the data was consistent throughout. The trick was to write a value of 1 to a file if the database was closed down normally without errors. On opening the database, the file was checked for the value of 1, and if so, the value was changed to 0 (is dirty flag) and the database opened normally. If the file had a value that was not 1, then the indexes were rewritten, the checkfile was given an value of 0 and the database opened.

Graceful shutdowns are a speciality of Microsoft Windows. If you did not shutdown Windows in an appropriate manner, you were punished by chkdsk, and then the Scandisk Inquisition, and you were berated for not shutting down Windows properly, even though it was usually Windows that prevented you from closing down by either that persistent little immovable eggtimer, or a cursor that refused to go down to the "start" button, so that you could start to shut down.

That magic Windows registry, which does not have any "dirty" checks (does it?) is guaranteed to eventually screw up bigtime. It has been dubbed the "single point of failure" for all Windows versions since 3.11.

 

[oldbamaguy]

Windows 3.11 goes a way back to "my time".
I did a lot of work on computer data bases in the 70s and 80s. I worked in computer accounting on mainframes.
I always ask folks, and how many boxes of IBM cards have YOU punched? My answer would be hundreds of boxes. I used to program Snoopys (from Peanuts) in Cobol.
The DirecTV UN Graceful Shutdown is, I believe, due to the working in the "off" position. The eSATA is not really totally accepted at DirecTV. It is, I believe, permitted, not supported. The number of DBSTALK entries that I saw concerning copying eSATAs kinda led me down the path thinking it would be MUCH easier. Perhaps a "Warning" sign was appropriate. If you don't use Linux, don't go there.

By the way, what is the language of choice these days by programmers? I ran through Cobol, Fortran, Basic and C as my primary language of choice. (I studied Cobol in the 60s.)
I CERTAINLY enjoyed discussing "things" with you Chris.
Sorry I was such a bother!!
Best Wishes Always!!
ed

 

[flyboytim]

I have to say I have never had to deal with punch cards. At school, in the fifth form, when there were options to learn Fortran and Cobol, I chose car maintenance instead.
The engine block was removed, the valves ground in, the engine block replaced, and everything else was fitted in reverse order to removal. The car was started and ran sweetly.
Meanwhile, the punch cards were sent off to the computing centre, and returned two weeks later with green-lined manuscript paper printoffs which mostly consisted of "syntax error" or "fatal stack overflow in..." or some such thing...The luckier ones got things like printf " hello world " or 2 + 4 = 6...driving an old (resurrected, even) Ford Prefect in tight circles around the quad certainly felt good to me.
I felt that programming a Texas Instrument calculator to do certain physics calculations was rather cool, except we could not take electronic calculators into exams - we had to rely on log tables and slide rules.
At University, computing remained a small department, I think that all the computing hardware was probably off-campus, despite Leeds being one of the largest UK universities outside Oxbridge and London.
Twelve years after graduating, I first used a PC, a Compaq Deskpro with two floppy 5 and a bit inch disks. It was dedicated to a special flatbed laser scanning densitometer that was used to determine protein concentration in two-dimensional separation gels. We programmed in basica, calculating the yields of cDNA and mRNA from our experimental procedures, and plotting standard curves and regression lines using very primitive graphics on screens with limited resolution.
Then someone had a 386 with a colour EGA (or was it CGA) screen, and a GEM graphical environment let me use their system. Something went wrong, and I thought the friendly sounding DOS v3 RESTORE command might just do the trick...
It did: File.001 File.002... it was amazing how many files could be fitted onto a floppy disk, at least 1000, anyhow...
I stuck to molecular Biology for a while longer, but in 1989 I started a Master's course in Information Science, and started to use Borland turbo pascal and Prolog, and some dos-based office called Smart suite, I was writing up my dissertation on Microsoft Word, and using Windows 2 Pbrush to illustrate my work, moonlighting in the computer labs in the evening on Apple Macintosh versions of Word.
The work had to get done somehow...

 

[BadBigBen]

The way I read it:

Ubuntu thinks it is a XFS Volume, but in actuality it is EXT3 FS (note the ID on SDB2 and SDB3, SDB1's ID is 82 which is swap space)...

also you do not want to mount SDB2 as that holds the OS for the TVBOX (or what ever it was/is), but rather SDB3 which most likely holds the files you want...

thus try the following instead to mnt the drive:

[cod]mkdr /mnt/eSata

mount -t ext3 /dev/sdb3 /mnt/eSata

cd /mnt/eSata[/code]


Ben
"If it works don't fix it! If it doesn't use a sledgehammer..."
How to ask a question, when posting them to a professional forum.
Only ask questions with yes/no answers if you want "yes" or "no"

 

[oldbamaguy]

Dear BigBadBen, (what a handle!!!, I love it!!!) I see what you are saying.
For a long long time, I didn't know ANYTHING about a mount command being out of that side of things for 20 years. I really like your mount point name /mnt/eSATA, that sure makes things a whole lot clearer to the less technically inclined.
I was wondering if I could do the next part or not.
And I am a bit confused by this part however
cd /mnt/eSata[/code]

I get the cd to /mnt/eSata part
but what is the [/code] part

using my simple KISS (Keep It Simple Stupid) approach I would have done
cd /mnt/eSata
ls -lat

Were you just putting together both of my "simple" commands into one line?

I think any of the "copy disk drive threads" at DBSTALK should have a Warning Label.
ie **** Warning - If you aren't running Linux and don't have a disk that was "gracefully" shutdown, don't try this. ****
Many Many Thanks for your input!!
ed (NOT big or bad)

 

[oldbamaguy]

To FlyBoyTim:
I was GREATLY impressed by your resume. Going in, I kinda figured that the folks at Tek-Tips were much more knowledgable than the "normal" user of DBSTALK, but I guess I didn't really understand just how much more knowledgable.
Quite frankly I don't feel worthy enough to even talk to some of you folks.
Anyway, for me, not quite after punched cards, maybe 1980
I had that Tektronic Graphic System. You would have loved it. The enhanced basic had a "move" and a "draw" command on a digitized output screen of a 120 X 100 grid. Ie move 50,50 print "hi there" in all kinds of sizes and fonts. The system could do math so you could draw a circle with one command. 50 k of memory. At first it used just a 1/2 drive in a maybe 4x6x1/2 case, I still see them from time to time. Later it had a 8 inch disk (that is not a typo, 8 inch), which looked just like the secretary's data processing disk of the period. The flat bed plotter had a pen for drawing the output and later it had a circle of 8 color pens that you could access directly. I spent hours manually digitizing photos. My almost famous "No BS" screen, had a red circle with a bar across a picture of a bull "doing his business", was very popular at the pentagon.
I think I sent about a hundred of them to Washington.
Well let me go, my UPS went squirelly last night after a power failure which outlasted their charge on Friday.
One just started beeping when the power was on.
I have three smaller ones, one for each HD-DVR and their "beeping" really makes a racket.
Best Wishes Always!!
ed

 

[Annihilannic]

BBB's [cod] ... [/code] reference was a typo, he meant to use [ignore]

...

[/ignore] which encloses text in a neat code box,

like this.

Did you try my suggestion above to identify the filesystems in question? You would need to do it for each individual partition, /dev/sdb1, 2 and 3 (in place of the /dev/yourdisk.

Annihilannic.

 

[BadBigBen]

Thanks Annihilannic, for clearing up the typo, I forgot to proofread what I typed (note I even forgot the I in mkdir)...

OldBamaGuy,
to clarify it a bit more (again) the mount point has to exist before you can mount anything to it, otherwise the MOUNT command will fail, this is why you create one with MKDIR first...

mkdir /mnt/eSata

I chose the name eSata because that would tell me after hours of work, on which drive I would be on.

Then you mount the FS to the mount point:

mount -t ext3 /dev/sdb3 /mnt/eSata

and move to that location with:

cd /mnt/eSata

The above is for mounting an EXT3 FS, procedures for other FS are similar.

here is a reference (the Man Page for mount)

http://linux.die.net/man/8/mount

which should also be available under Ubuntu with the command:

{b]man mount{/b]

PS: this all has to be done as ROOT (of course you know that) and do follow Annihillanic's advice on finding out which FS is in use on that partition (or use the command:
sfdisk -l /dev/sdb to list all on that drive]...

PSS: to the handle, well I'm 6'4" weigh in at around 280lbs which denotes the BIG, the BAD because I ride a Hawg (Harley), and Ben has been my nickname for ages...

Ben
"If it works don't fix it! If it doesn't use a sledgehammer..."
How to ask a question, when posting them to a professional forum.
Only ask questions with yes/no answers if you want "yes" or "no"

 

[oldbamaguy]

Many Many Thanks for the info!!
I strongly believe that all the problems I am having with the mount are due to my UN "graceful power shut down". My thinking is that it is a dynamic system even in "off", you have to a special shutdown to get a "clean Superblock".
IE menu reset and unplug just as all the leds go out.
Then you can
sudo mkdir /mnt/esata
sudo mount -t xfs -o rtdev=/dev/sdb3 /dev/sdb2 /mnt/esata
(and I hope)
sudo cd /mnt/esata
sudo ls -lat
sudo umount /mnt/esata

Most of my problems are because of the dynamic nature and the encoding of the data on /dev/sdb3 I think. I think /dev/sdb2 is not encoded, I hope.
An extended power failure (2 1/2 hours) lasted past the 2 hour lives on my UPSes. The beeping nearly drove me crazy and I have even had random beepings 30 and 60 hours after the return to normal, I thought. I am trying to figure out how to program the APC ES 550gs to disable the audible alarm tones. Since I have to unplug the UPS to turn off the tones, I can do a "graceful power shut down" at the same time.

Please give me a few days and I'll let you know about the latest developments.
Again TYVM!!

 

[Annihilannic]

Usually the way to clear the dirty flag in the superblock is to run an fsck -t <filesystem_type> <device_path> (filesystem check).

However you would want to be sure that you are fixing the right filesystem type first, hence my tip to (hopefully) identify the filesystem.

Annihilannic.

 

[oldbamaguy]

I finally got the UPS side of things straightened out a bit.
I now intend to turn off the beeps on my other UPSes. I have done one already and it seemed to work.
The reason I am mentioning this is that if I intend to do the other UPSes, I can do a "graceful power down" on the eSATA while I am working with the UPSes. Hopefully this will provide me with a "clean superblock" that I can access.
I just have to run a bunch of UPS tests to verify that I did what I had hoped. Then the next step is the "graceful shutdown" of the eSATA. Perhaps by the end of the week, I will have more information.
Many Many Thanks!!
ed

 

[flyboytim]

Ed, I wonder if you should try the MFSLive Linux system (an open-source Linux Distribution for TiVo boxes):

http://www.tivocommunity.com/tivo-vb/showthread.php?t=327239[/URL]]Checkout MFSLive Linux Boot CD v1.3b.
Added xfs filesystem support so you can explore Directv non-Tivo HD DVR HR20-100, HR20-700

MFSLive version 1.4 is found here:

http://mfslive.org/download.htm

the older version 1.3b is here:

http://www.dvrupgrade.com/downloads/mfslive-1.3b.iso.zip

They are both live CD versions, so it is not necessary to install them, just burn the CD and boot from them, but they work fine as installed Linux systems, or as Virtual Machines under VMPlayer.

It is command line only, but has all the stuff you should need to connect to your eSATA drive via USB, and possibly better XFS support than Ubuntu.

It weighs in at less than 10Mb.

Linux native partitions have an ID of 83, but support various filesystems:

http://www.win.tue.nl/~aeb/partitions/partition_types-1.html[/URL]]Various filesystem types like xiafs, ext2, ext3, reiserfs, etc. all use ID 83. Some systems mistakenly assume that 83 must mean ext2.

 

[oldbamaguy]

********************SUCCESS********************************
Well apparently my theory of unplugging just the HD-DVR and not both the HD-DVR and eSATA at the "no LEDs" point in receiver reset was the key. When I powered down the UPS which had both the HD-DVR and the eSATA drive plugged in, I got the old "dirty block" message in Linux. On reset #2, I unplugged just the HD-DVR and I got a mountable eSATA!! I did something like this
sudo mkdir /mnt/pnta
sudo mount -t xfs -o rtdev=/dev/sdb3 /dev/sdb2 /mnt/pnta
ls -lat /mnt/pnta
cd /mnt/pnta/mw_data
ls -lat
and I got the directory which showed (among other things) the various lines of recordings, their size and the date they were created.
THAT IS WHAT I WANTED ALL ALONG!!!!
Many Many Thanks for all your assistance!!
***********************************************************

 

[kjv1611]

Thanks for the follow-ups on something like this, oldbamaguy. It sounds like something I could easily run into myself.