Panasonic WJ-HD316A - has the drive formatted or not?

[Shplad 0]

Hi:

 

I am still working at configuring the WJ-HD316A I got used a little while back. As I mentioned in other posts, I'm an EX-IT tech, but I don't know a lot about DVRs.

 

I'm trying to format one of the internal drives. I believe I went through the correct menus, and am now

looking at the following screen:

 

 

HDD Disk menu-->Auto Setup-->Result of Format

 

Result of Format: Main-1 - Loading OK

 

 

It has been sitting on this screen for about half an hour. Does this mean it's finished formatting

the drive? Did it ever start formatting the drive? I tried pressing Setup and ESC again, but the

DVR just stays in this menu. The HDD1 LED is light constantly right now.

 

Do DVRs do destructive (long) formats or short formats? IS there ever any kind of progress indicator?

This set of menus ain't what I'd call intuitive.

 

I checked in the manual, but this part is conveniently skipped over.

 

Also, the HDD 1 LED is now unlit, and the drive was labelled in the HDD menu as "Lost".

I don't think it's physically dead. I think I may have shut off the machine

when it was in the middle of something. Not good, I know, but....when I can't see any status or

progress indicators, it's pretty hard to know what the heck to do some times.

 

Like right now. When I can't even tell if the machine has crashed/hung or if it's formatting a drive

or ??

 

Thanks for any advice.

[SectorSecurity 0]

Usually it is just a quick format as an EXT3 filesystem. If you are asking do they usually erase the data when formatting, the answer is no, even your computer does not do this, it simply marks each sector as available, it does not actually remove the old data. This is what makes data recovery available.

 

I would say to try and reformat the drive again, it shouldn't take more then a few minutes. If you still have doubts take the drive out and pop it in a computer, boot up a linux live CD and mount the drive, this should tell you if there is a problem or not.

[Shplad 0]

SectorSecurity:

 

So you're saying not every sector on that drive got written with a zero. LOL

 

Thanks for that advice. Actually, I don't think the dang drive even formatted.

It just sat there on the results screen for an hour. So I eventually shut if off. Does that mean

it was hung on that screen? Is there some secret way to escape that screen if the thing appears

to be hung?

 

With this unit, every time I have to power it off, I don't know whether I'm corrupting

the filesystem or not. It's very very frustrating. When it's stuck on that screen, I can't

hit the restart button. Moreover, even when I can, the restart button doesn't seem to

engage or do anything.

 

Will the machine accept a standard ext formatting as its own, or does Panasonic put

some proprietary markers in addition to a regular Linux filesystem or something like that on it.

It's been hours and hours since I've been trying to get this going properly.

 

 

Shplad

[Shplad 0]

Okay, it turns out one of the drives was going bad, and I didn't know it. But the machine

kept barfing on it and so couldn't do things properly even on the good drive.

On top of that, a sharp support rep. explained to me that because of the monitor

I was using, I might be selecting cancel instead of OK/Enter because the buttons'

were highlighted in terms of shade/colour differently than one might expect. I had

to select the button highlighted in white, not black, to do what I wanted. Hm...

 

After some (very helpful) time with Panasonic's support rep., drive #1 is formatted,

drive #2 is disconnected, and I'm ready to remove drive #2 from the case.

 

Do I have to remove any screws other than the two that are easily visible to take

the second drive out? Do I have to remove that whole caddy/mount somehow,

or can I just remove those screws to take out drive 2?

 

 

Thanks

[SectorSecurity 0]

I would say just remove the two screws, it is possible there is more but I can't say for sure.

 

And yes when you format nothing actually gets written with 0's, the sectors are simply marked available in the File Table which tells the system you can write data here.

 

Writing 0's to a drive is what we call zeroing the drive, this is the process by which you run software which will actually write 0's, 1's or random data to each sector on the drive several times. This is often referred to as drive wiping. Contrary to popular belief this process does not actually happen when you format a hard drive.

 

If you ever format a hard drive then view it with a hex viewer all the data is still there.

[Shplad 0]

Thanks again.

 

Man, this unit was cheap for a reason. Looks like I screwed up hoping it wouldn't need much work.

Not sure it was worth it, but I'm in this far, so...

 

I'll try to get another drive. The current one, which is still working, has (YIKES!) 37000 hours on it.

The one that died had about the same.

 

In another of my posts, I mentioned that this unit is blasting loud. The fans seem to be generating

most of the noise. Anyone know where I could get a good price on replacement fans (of same

model?)

 

 

"Contrary to popular belief this process does not actually happen when you format a hard drive."

 

It does if you issue a destructive format command, which is what I always do. Whenever I didn't bother,

too many weird and "inexplicable" things happened, at least with Windows.