TiVo Community Forums Archives - Expert advice needed on Zone Map Corruption

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Expert advice needed on Zone Map Corruption
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Posted by: WolfieCA

Brief synopsis:

Zone map corrupt on my old drives, is there ANY way to repair so I can get the program material off my old drives?

Full Synopsis
I have a Phillips HDR312 which I uprgaded about a year ago with a second 80gb Maxtor Drive.

About 2 months ago, the drive started intermittently stuttering and freezing. Last week the system started freezing up. I had to repower and it would come back up with the green screen of death. It would go through it's repair and start functioning again. A day or two later it would lock up again. I'd reboot, and all would be fine for a day or so.

The last time it froze up, it will not come back up. It comes up with the "starting up" screen, changes to the "almost there" screen for about 20 seconds and then the screen freezes momentarily and the system reboots.

I've created a new drive, and TIVO is working fine with that, but I do have some program material on my old drives that I really need to keep.

When I setup to copy the drives to a new drive with mfstools 2.0, I get the following errors:

mfs_load_volume_header: Primary Zone map corrupt, loading backup
mfs_load_volume_header: Secondary zone map corrupt, giving up
mfs_load_volume_header: Zone map checksum error!
mfs backup failed to start
restore failed.success

I've run MaxBlast, and the drives report fine, but the original 30gb drive is too old for the S.M.A.R.T diagnosis.

Anyone have any ideas for me?

Rich

Posted by: redddevil

No help I'm afraid as I'm in the same boat. I got this trying to mfsadd 1 drive to another.
Is there an easy way to tell whcih drive has the problem??
TFYH

Posted by: amgqmp1

hmm...3 of us in this boat (well, 2.5 I'm just helping a co-worker). ;)

Anyhow, I can lend a hand helping you isolate which drive it is. You can run "mfstool info /dev/hdx" (strip the quotes, replace the /hdx with the drives in your system, like /hda or /hdb). When you find the one that gives the zone map error, that's the bad one. my co-worker ran into this EXACT same problem trying to do an mfsadd of a new drive. anyone with advice on how to get the thing going again with the least amount of data loss would be mucho appreciated. ;)

Posted by: wkirke

One trick to try: (May or may not work, I've had mixed results doing this)

1) Figure out which of the two original drives is giving this error, and which one is good. (See previous post using mfstoo info.) We'll call these original drives A1 and B1.

2) Build a new set of drives from a backup image, using -x to expand the backup. Use the same size drives as the two that have the problem. We'll call these drives A2 and B2.

3) Take the good drive of the A1/B1 set (let's assume it's A1), and the married drive from the freshly built "2" set (would be B2 in this example). Hook them up to your PC (A1 to /dev/hdc and B2 to /dev/hdd) and boot the MFS Tools 2.0 CD. Make sure you have a big FAT32 drive also connected, and mount it at /mnt/dos.

4) Do an mfstool backup -9sTao /mnt/dos/bigTiVo.bak /dev/hdc /dev/hdd
This will try to backup the mismatched drives, saving ALL streams. Note, TiVo doesn't like married couples trading partners like this (what an analogy!), but the mfstool backup seems to be able to handle it. It will give a warning about headers not matching, but it will continue anyway.

5) Now, restore this huge backup onto A2 & B2. If your lucky, the streams from the working A1 drive will be on this new drive set. (And your A1 B1 drives are unmodified, in case this doesn't help, so you haven't lost anything in case somebody else comes up with a better way to recover streams.)

I'm going to play with this idea some more this weekend. I'll write up better instructions if I can get it to work reliably.

-Bill Kirke

Posted by: amgqmp1

I guess my prob. is more like the second poster. I've got a situation where there's an "A" drive that is yielding this Zone Map Corruption error. This occured after trying to use the "mfsadd" command to add a second, blank "B" drive to system. The only thing I know to do to fix this is restore an ancient backup of the "A" drive (it has 2.5). I was hoping there might be a tool/tips on correcting the Zone Map on an "A" drive with content.

If there's not, that's cool. But...if you know how to fix this...I'll give you a cookie! :cool:

EDIT: I'll still give ya a cookie, but, no info needed anymore. My co-worker ended up wiping the drives a bit ago, restoring, and he's on his way to test everything out. Thanks for the suggestion and good luck to the rest of ya.

Posted by: wkirke

Does anybody know of any documentation on whats in the zone map? I'm interested in trying to write a tool that will help folks recover from things like this, and maybe even transfer streams from Series 1 to Series 2.

This could degenerate into a video extraction discussion, which is prohibited on this forum. So lets keep the forum clean -- please PM me any info you have that might help me build a tool to recover disks that are corrupted.

Thanks
-Bill Kirke

Posted by: redddevil

Thanks for the suggestion to find out which is bad - I'll try that tomorrow. When I find out which it is should I throw it away or can I just format it and still use it?
Thanks Bill for your suggestion but having now got a successful backup into my TiVo on an 80 Gb drive I don't think buying another 30 + 40 pair is worth it - I'm not THAT bothered about the recordings but would sooner not lose them without a fight! Your suggestion imples that mfstools (and TiVo) are aware of both drive sizes in each pair so I guess the various other drives I could play with won't help me much - I'll just have to wait a bit longer to watch Shanghai Triad!
Any idea what corrupts the zone map? Was it something I did?

Posted by: redddevil

I now have to show my ignorance of Linux file systems. I ran the mfstool info on both of the drives with the following results:

30 Gb drive (old 'A' drive)
Second mfs drive needed: no such file or directory
Second mfs drive needed 2: illegal seek
[above repeated a further 3 times with 2 becoming 3, 4, 5]
then
mfs_load_volume_header: total sectors 57699328 mismatch with volume header (135869440)
loading anyway
[then zone map corruption message]

so I figured that this was the naff drive BUT

40 Gb drive (old 'B' drive)
mfs_load_volume_header:mgsvol_read_data:input/output error

Just to add confusion I used the latest powermax software to test the drives (they're both Quantum fireballs) and it certified them both error free.

I assume this means
a) I could use the drives in a PC
b) The recordings are still there but the file system's corrupt
c) Neither is usable in a TiVo as is

Should I give up completely on the recordings?
Can I use (one of) the drives to expand my (now working) 80 Gb TiVo and if so what would I need to do first?
If it's "only" a file system problem what chance is there of it being fixable [I'm shouting for Bill on this one]?
And mostly - how did I cause it? (See separate post "mother of all problems")
TFYH

Posted by: WolfieCA

Bill -

I'll give this a try as soon as I can find a 15gb drive somewhere. Any ideas?

Rich

Posted by: wudilye

I'm also having the same sort of problem.

I'm using mfstools 2.0 to upgrade an HDR310 with dual 13Gb drives to dual 120Gb. I've done a backup, that worked well, and can even restore onto the dual 120s, but I want to preserve my recordings so I've been trying to copy each drive using the command:

mfsbackup -Tao - /dev/hdc | mfsrestore -s 127 -xzpi - /dev/hda

and get the error message:

Second MFS drive: No such file or directory
Second MFS drive2: Illegal seek
Second MFS drive: No such file or directory
Second MFS drive3: illegal seek
mfs_load_volume_header: Total sectors (25629696) mismatch with volume header (52193280)
mfs_load_volume_header: Loading anyway.
mfs_load_zone_map: Primary zone map corrupt, loading backup.
mfs_load_zone_map: Secondary zone map corrupt, giving up.
mfs_load_zone_map: Zone map checksum error!
backup: Backup failed to startup. Make sure you specified the right devices, and that the drives are not locked.
Restore failed: -: Success

Anyone have any ideas?

Posted by: Robert S

Try backing up both drives. Why are you trying to copy the recordings off only the A drive? Are you hoping to copy the B drive later?

Posted by: wudilye

When I did the successful backup, it was from both drives:

mfsbackup -6so /mnt/dos/tivo.bak /dev/hdc /dev/hdb

Are you saying to try backing up each individually? I could try that, would it give further insight to a possible cause?

Yes, the errors above are trying the backup | restore on Tivo Drive A, when I was successful, I would repeat with Tivo Drive B. I don't have a floppy in the machine so I need my IDE CD-Rom drive, so I couldn't have all four drives attached at once.