Problem initialising hard disk

Quote from djmist

When I go to initialise the hard disk it never gets past 50%, I even left it over night. The message comes up that the disk is initialising and I can watch TV while the process is working, but it never completes.

I even left it over night and still it was only at 50%.

Any ideas why this is?

I have an Alien 2 Triple tuner running Satstation Beta E2

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I had a lot of issues on and Amiko Alien SHD-8900 with initialising the HDD in Enigma2 images. With some images I just couldn't get it working but a lot of the time its simply that the HDD isn't actually mounted in the Mount menu so it won't initialise - the image see's the drive is there but can't do anything with it.
Not familiar with your image but would imagine like most enigma2 images there will be an extra menu for all the hardware settings (not the tuning menu etc). Somewhere in there there should be a mount menu or hard disk menu and look at the mounted hw. If your HDD is not mounted just manually change the mount points to sda1, reboot the box fully then try initialising, if still doesn't work look if there HDparm and SDparm menus and try SDparm as some drives don't work well with HDparm.

Still a relative newbie to this box and the old Linux sat scene but hope maybe this can help and if not hopefully someone more experienced than me can assist you.

John.

Quote from djmist

The usb stick that I used initially to test the recording function and which worked, now does not work and behaves like the other drives I have connected. Im very frustrated.

To be honest I'd suggest flashing a different image - I tried several before finally finding one that worked with my HDD and was stable. I use a Pkteam Nebula v3 image on my Alien 1 but not sure what images are available for the Alien 2 but should be plenty of info in this and other forums.

One thing worth mentioning - I have heard that the Alien boxes don't have enough power output to power the HDD. So you need one with its own PSU or another USB port on another device if its the type with 2 USB connectors. I actually plug my second (power input) USB connection on my HDD into a mobile phone charger and works great.

Afraid thats about as much as I can advise but I'm sure some of the more experienced members here may be able to help you out.

Quote from djmist

The disk is mounted on sda1, i checked in mount manager. I have since tried a different HD and it would not initialise either.

Previously I had a 4gb usb flash drive connected and it worked ok so I dont know what the problem is.

Just to confuse things more - just because the HDD shows its mounted on SDA1 in mount manager doesn't mean your mount points are all set to SDA1 - initialising and recording need the mount points to all be set to point at the HDD to work. There should be a list of about 9 mount points in mount manager with names like "Movies" and "Media/Movies" - each one of these should show SDA1 on the right hand side - if not then just use the arrow keys until it does for each one then mount it manually and should be fine. I wouldn't personally set Automount on as I couldn't get my HDD working with Automount enabled.

Is it formatted to Fat32? Something little I know.

Quote from djmist

john: the HD's I have been using are all usb powered, ill try one with a power supply. Ill have a deeper look at the mounting later.

mikey: I have the drives formatted with Fat32

Drive needs to be formatted with ext3 or ext4 - these are linux based images so they don't support the windows file format.