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billyvnilly · 2012-01-11, 04:18

I have openelec with EDEN beta,

I edited my Videos and TV shows to point at folders on my expansion drive (2TB external drive). It started to scan and now all my videos are gone! I check the hard drive on my windows laptop and it says the folder is corrupt!

HOW THE F*CK does XBMC CORRUPT a hard drive! WTF WTF.

If anyone can help.

billyvnilly · 2012-01-11, 04:31

So running chkdsk in windows, but its going to take about 10+ hours at this rate to finish verifying. I certainly hopes it recovers my stuff.

BUT WHY did this happen? How can xbmc corrupt an external drive? How can I prevent it from happening again.

jschoen · 2012-01-11, 05:04

There are numerous things that could have happened, and while I am no expert I would not point the finger at XBMC. If it was the culprit you would see many other instances of this occurring.

One of the possibilities is your hard drive is going out. So I would back anything up on there that is important on the drive.

Check out here for some other causes (one of the first results of a quick google search).

billyvnilly · 2012-01-12, 01:33

Yeah I know, thats why I was like wtf. but its a brand new external drive and thus far, never happened before. IMMEDIATELY noticed it after canceling a media scan... first media scan I've ever done, even though I've been running openelec for 2 months. No problems before this. I think it was xbmc or at the very least openelec/linux... no improper disconnecting. No power shortage. chkdsk fixed it (after 12+ hours for the verification).

xbmcg · (This post was last modified: 2012-01-12, 01:52 by xbmcg.)

I've had a similar issue with a 6 month old 2TB SATA drive from Western Digital (WD20EARS Caviar Green), what dies after trying the CDAlbumArt plugin (it ran about 10 hours creating the inital database with heavy drive operations).

Seems to crashed / overheatet the controler. The drive spins up and positions the heads on startup, but is no longer recognized by the BIOS / no longer accessible. It could also be a firmware issue. It not seems to have a head crash or so - no strange operation noises.

In google there are several forums complaining about this series so I have sent it back (warranty), also a lot of data rescue companies describe similar errors on the internet.

I would bet on the hardware quality, not on xbmc software as reason for that.

...

**PatK** · 2012-01-12, 02:00

I would also join the voices who speculate a hardware issue. I've lost an external USB drive to a bad connector and the power supplies on these things are not certified anything.. When you have hardware issues and you're writing to the device in question, it's anyone's guess what the scramble will be. The Stress on the hardware when scrapping the whole drive is what probably put the drive over the edge.

d3monlama · 2012-09-17, 08:20

For all people trying to avert this from XBMC, here's a few easy steps to corrupt your file system...

1. Plugin your external harddrive
2. Browse to some movie directory
3. Hit back to go to the main menu when i realize the subs are not in the right place/format
4. Unplug external drive
5. Hook it up with my notebook to rearrange the movie files in the directory
6. Re plug external drive to XBMC
7. Reopen Video section

And then it's corrupted. XBMC will open the last opened folder (ie. the movie i was going to watch) and shows an empty folder. Hopping out and back into the directory doesn't solve the issue and after finally re attaching the drive to my notebook Windows tells me the directory is corrupt. I've fallen for this a few times now... wanting to watch a movie, trying to quickly rearrange stuff to get my subs going.... and ending up not watching that movie at all...

So i'm not sure wheter to point to bad hardware all to fast...

artrafael · 2012-09-17, 08:34

Between steps 3 & 4 and 5 & 6, did you execute "safely remove" drive in XBMC or your operating system before unplugging the drive?

d3monlama · 2012-09-17, 08:47

@Artrafael: No, and that's most likely the cause. Still, this problem ONLY let's it self replicate this way according the above steps. If i'd moved out of the movies folder before step 3 and did exactly the same there is no problem. So it appears to me that XBMC somehow performs write actions upon returning into it's old folder as where i believe it just should rescan it's contents.

Anyhow... of course you're right and a clean removal should be performed, but i'm very sure a lot of people skip that step.

ZyanKLee · 2012-09-17, 09:22

(2012-09-17, 08:47)d3monlama Wrote: So it appears to me that XBMC somehow performs write actions upon returning into it's old folder as where i believe it just should rescan it's contents.

Sure it does. XMBC most probably writes (at least temporary) metadata. If XBMC would not do this, the whole scanning thingy would be just wasted time. I did not look into this case, but if I where to handle removable drives within xbmc, I wouldn't write meta data in the XBMC-database at ~/.xbmc/ but on the removable drive. Thats because that data would bloat up the static database while only needed when the removable is connected.

(2012-09-17, 08:47)d3monlama Wrote: Anyhow... of course you're right and a clean removal should be performed, but i'm very sure a lot of people skip that step.

Yes ... but who's fault is that? Neither XBMC nor the operating system can guess when you are going to rip the plug out of the usb socket to flush the filesystems cache to disk before you do.
When you break a screw, would you blame it on the screwdriver? People just need to learn to handle their stuff with care. Most people only do after creating a major disaster.