Topic: Recovery of Files in Archive (0)MB?

[laopa]

Hi,


Sorry for the newbiness.

This has happened to me a couple of times before with my Toppy Black Panther, which has already had the HD and Power Source replaced.

When I opened up the Archive a couple of days ago it now shows all the files I had recorded and stored as having (0) MB with the correct length of time, (0) minutes with (1MB) or the original channel designation is lost and only a comma followed by DVBT shows?

None of these files will play.

How can these files be recovered and what causes this problem?

Help.

laopa :'(

[tonymy01]

Strange forum to post in, this is the ICE forum related to ICE on a Toppy, not a general Topfield support forum.   http://www.itopfield.com.au has working forums again finally.   Having said that, this issue plagued 4400 owners, and it is a firmware bug that causes the HDD filesystem to get corrupted.   You may be able to rescue it with a PC application called TopfHD/RW, but I have my doubts if you have let it go on too long like this.   You will need to pull the HDD out (or at least pull the lid off and run a long IDE cable & power to a USB HDD case) and put it into your PC to run this.
The firmware bug was an issue for September 2006 firmwares for the normal 5Ks, but happened very infrequently, if at all.   It plagued 4400 owners with whatever version they ended up with, and an upgrade sorted that out.    The Feb06 firmware is very reliable, as is the 2009 firmware, forget the 2007 & 2008 firmwares (dual recording bugs etc).

Oh... Black Panther.... good luck finding firmware for that model.

The cause is basically the filesystem knows something is there, but can't decipher the header of the REC file properly due to the file access tables of the filesystem being corrupted (theory).   Without a proper REC header, it can't determine quite a number of the parameters of the file.

You can simulate this issue by pulling the power plug while recording, and find the header doesn't get written properly (it only properly gets updated once the file has finished recording)  and it can only show the original time it expected it was recording for, and the filename.

There is a plethora of firmware hacks to get around this corrupted REC header on power fail "bug", but for a corrupted filesystem where every file is wrong, you need to take further action.   Perhaps as a last resort before ripping it out to use TopfHD/RW on it, you could try pulling the plug while it is powered on, and the next time you power it up, it does a HDD check, and may recover the corrupted filesystem tables, but I doubt it.

Regards