Folks,
This may help someone, we have a Pace Sky+ box that some time ago was fitted with a 500Gb disc, and most of the time, it behaves itself, and the extra space is a real bonus. We were watching the F1 GP at the weekend and the power died, and came back about 45 seconds later. The irritation was that the box refused to come back up, even after trying a forced software download, and there were a significant number of recordings on the disc, so a reformat wasn't a simple decision. It absolutely refused to play ball, so it was time for some more detailed work.
First step was to put the original 160 Gb disc back in and see if the box recovered. It did, despite the data on the disc being a couple of years old, so that meant the box as such was working, and hadn't been fried. Tried the 500 disc again, no go.
Put the 500 in to a caddy and did a backup with copy+, and it appeared to be happy with all the information it found on the disc, and copied OK.
Put the 160 in to the caddy and checked to see if there were any different files in the root directory, and there appeared to be a difference, so tried putting that file on to the 500, but still no go.
Tried rebuilding the MBR and the BIOS using the utilities, but still no go, so in the end, put the 500 back in the Sky box, and did a power up format, which of course cleared the disc.
That at least got the box working again, which meant that it was a corrupt file somewhere in the boot process.
At that stage, formatted again and then took the disc out of the Sky box, and put it back in the caddy to see if there was anything that might help with the recovery, nothing immediately apparent.
Then tried copying the files from the backup to the 500 disc with copy+, and after the copy had finished and it had gone through the endian checks, tried the box again in the sky box, it booted, did a planner rebuild just in case, and it came back up, and all the recordings were there, which was very pleasing.
Seems that a file needed for boot was corrupted when the power failed, and I can only assume that having formatted the disc and rebuilt it from the copy, the corruption was in an area of the files that is not affected by a copy, so moving the files across from the backup didn't re corrupt the data needed for the boot to work.
Not sure if anyone has the information to analyse this any deeper, it is a problem we've seen before on occasions, and on that basis, it would be helpful if there was a way to do the equivalent of a windows check disk on the Sky disc, and then if necessary do the relevant repair to the file structure.
So, has anyone had any success in unravelling the disc structure in more detail in order to make it possible to do these sort of repair? if you have, has the information been published anywhere?
Thanks
Steve