Sky+ box change - hard drive question

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Sky+ box change - hard drive question

Postby moozer » Fri Nov 08, 2013 3:46 pm

Hi all.

I had to replace my Pace Sky+ SD box with an Amstrad DRX280 box.

I have swapped the Pace Hard Drive into the Amstrad box, but my recording cannot be viewed.

I've used Copy + to see what the deal is with the Pace hard drive, but the program doesn't show any recordings.

Is there any way of viewing them?

Thanks in advance

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Re: Sky+ box change - hard drive question

Postby pcbbc » Fri Nov 08, 2013 4:31 pm

Please see Compatibility:
Pace SD boxes were all Litle Endian boxes (with the exception of the venerable V1 box which was big - but I doubt you had one of them).
Amstrad SD boxes however were all Big Endian.

Copy+ could have fixed the "endianess" of the data, with a simple conversion - had you used it prior to transferring the drive.

Unfortunately, as you have put the drive with incompatible Endian data in the box and booted it, the new box has deleted all the data as being invalid. Basically a byte sequence such as 64 00 00 00 (which would be interpreted as 100 decimal on a little endian machine) is now being read by a big endian machine which sees it as 1,677,721,600 decimal. You can see how nothing would work correctly...
Regrettably it is not possible to recover from this as the original data has been permanently written over and erased by the box when it didn't understand it.

Sorry.

I would suggest a Full System Reset on the drive to ensure absolutely everything is correctly set back to defaults.
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Re: Sky+ box change - hard drive question

Postby moozer » Fri Nov 08, 2013 11:07 pm

pcbbc wrote:Please see Compatibility:
Pace SD boxes were all Litle Endian boxes (with the exception of the venerable V1 box which was big - but I doubt you had one of them).
Amstrad SD boxes however were all Big Endian.

Copy+ could have fixed the "endianess" of the data, with a simple conversion - had you used it prior to transferring the drive.

Unfortunately, as you have put the drive with incompatible Endian data in the box and booted it, the new box has deleted all the data as being invalid. Basically a byte sequence such as 64 00 00 00 (which would be interpreted as 100 decimal on a little endian machine) is now being read by a big endian machine which sees it as 1,677,721,600 decimal. You can see how nothing would work correctly...
Regrettably it is not possible to recover from this as the original data has been permanently written over and erased by the box when it didn't understand it.

Sorry.

I would suggest a Full System Reset on the drive to ensure absolutely everything is correctly set back to defaults.


Windows shows all folders and files in place. Surely these are salvageable?
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Re: Sky+ box change - hard drive question

Postby moozer » Fri Nov 08, 2013 11:09 pm

moozer wrote:
Windows shows all folders and files in place. Surely these are salvageable?


All I want to get back is a particular show that had my kids in the audience. It was from CBBC (a FTA channel). If it is possible, could you please advise me on what to try.

Many thanks

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Re: Sky+ box change - hard drive question

Postby pcbbc » Sat Nov 09, 2013 12:51 am

There's a lot more to it than that.

The planner database is deleted and almost certainly the file allocation table for the video data is also erased. These are both key to being able to recover or playback anything. Without the video FAT your recordings are scattered all over the disk with no clues as to how to find them or put them back together. A directory entry, which is all you can see now because these are endian-independent file system structures, tells you nothing other than something was there, but not which clusters it uses past the first one. And a box won't play ANYTHING without a planner database to go with those files, and I have absolutely no idea how to create all the hundreds of fields and populate them with the correct entries to make a recording play correctly.

If you want take an image of the disk using the disk image tool in the support forum and send it to me for analysis I can look at it. Regretably you are not the first person to do this by a long way, and if it were even remotely fixable I would coded a utility to do it long before now.....
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Re: Sky+ box change - hard drive question

Postby moozer » Sat Nov 09, 2013 1:07 am

pcbbc wrote:There's a lot more to it than that.

The planner database is deleted and almost certainly the file allocation table for the video data is also erased. These are both key to being able to recover or playback anything. Without the video FAT your recordings are scattered all over the disk with no clues as to how to find them or put them back together. A directory entry, which is all you can see now because these are endian-independent file system structures, tells you nothing other than something was there, but not which clusters it uses past the first one. And a box won't play ANYTHING without a planner database to go with those files, and I have absolutely no idea how to create all the hundreds of fields and populate them with the correct entries to make a recording play correctly.

If you want take an image of the disk using the disk image tool in the support forum and send it to me for analysis I can look at it. Regretably you are not the first person to do this by a long way, and if it were even remotely fixable I would coded a utility to do it long before now.....



pcbbc - I have an important and VERY significant update:

The program ExPVR works! It shows all 103 of my recordings. ALL recordings are listed - correctly named, dated, etc. I copied an unencrypted recording from the disk to my PC, but with a 200MB limit :cry:

If you know of any similar free programs that can extract the full video - let me know.

This is quite significant - these recordings, it would seem, are recoverable.

With neither copy+ nor extract+ working, there HAS to be software out there to cater for this!

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Re: Sky+ box change - hard drive question

Postby moozer » Sat Nov 09, 2013 1:02 pm

Update 2

If I have both the old Pace drive AND the new Amstrad drive attached to the PC - Extract+ detects all recordings!

What gives?

So, question is - does Extract+ allow me to transfer from the old to the new (both drives are now flagged as Big Endian)

I tried copying 15 programs using exPVR (free trial limit), but the Amstrad box still shows no recordings
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SOLVED: Sky+ box change - hard drive question

Postby moozer » Sun Nov 10, 2013 12:33 am

Update 3

Okay - managed to use Extract+ to save all of my FTA recordings onto the PC - No problem.

Used VideoReDo to convert the STR files to MP4 - No problem!

All my recordings saved, converted and in tact - SORTED

PHEW!
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