HUGE bug in 1.06.15

[WDTVUser]

Tony,

I have had issues with the Live+ that were not resolved by powering off with the remote, but WERE resolved by unplugging and replugging the power adapter.

As an example: I had an problem where mpeg-2 files would start playing normally, then slow down and the sound would go away. Powering off and on with the remote did not fix it, but unplugging and plugging the power adapter did fix it. I should mention that I was playing from a network share and there was no drive in the USB port. I'm thinking there must be a difference between powering off with the remote and unplugging the power adapter.

I would like to know if powering off with the remote, without first doing an Eject, can corrupt a connected USB drive. Perhaps no one here has an answer to that.

[RoofingGuy]

Powering "off" a Live or a Live Plus with the power button on the remote should be safely removing the drive during the power-down sequence.  I personally "Eject" anyways... "better safe than sorry".  Of course, for me it isn't much of a hassle, since I basically leave my Live on 24/7 and am rarely shutting it down or rebooting it, so I rarely need to bother with the preemptive "Eject"s.

But yes, obviously there's a difference between powering "off" and disconnecting power... obviously when powered "off" some circuits need to remain energized in order to read the IR sensor and look for a power "on" remote signal, or else the device could never turn back on.  I believe the main processor has its power removed when you turn it "off" with the remote, but I don't know exactly which other chips are shut down and which ones stay powered up.

But, disconnecting the power (as opposed to turning "off" with the remote) can be problematic if handles are still open and caches aren't cleared.  If users want to shut their WDTV off with a power bar, as opposed to using the remote, I'd strongly suggest "Eject"ing drives first, to make sure nothing is still open and to prevent corruption.

[Rider]

Thanx for the power off answer guys.  It was kind of what I figured, but ya never know......

As a rule, I power down from the remote when I'm done for the evening, and before I switch drives (I really would like USB hub support......), but was curious if a remote power off was adequate.

[rtguille]

I allways power off the unit from the remote, asuming that it will umount / close the drive's filesystems properly. (I do have a WD Live).

The last time i "ejected" the drive (fw 1.06.15_V) and for the first time (i used it for more than a year) i was forced to unplugg the unit from the ac power due a full firmware freeze.

I think that there is a bug when playing isos (which played fine in this fw, to my surprise, i do play isos very infrequently) and when ejecting the fw does not umount the loopback mounted iso (since it uses linux, that is probably what happend).

[RoofingGuy]

That's interesting rtguille... I'm trying to recreate that now.  I've never personally noticed any "Eject"ing issues after playing an .iso.

But, just in the vein of this whole discussion, I can offer a few other observations.

Let's say you just disconnect a USB drive from a PC or a Mac, without "Safely Remove/Eject"ing it.  We've all been told that this can/will corrupt the drive, and in fact many users end up confirming this... they disconnect the drive from their Mac, let's say, and then when they try to re-connect it the Mac won't recognize it because they've corrupted the file system.  And yet, apparently, the exact same corrupted drive can be read by *nix...  *nix isn't really repairing the corruption without being asked/told to, and merely connecting the corrupted drive to *nix and then back to the Mac doesn't really get the drive working again -- it's still corrupted.  It's just that *nix seems better positioned to ignore some file system corruption -- or at least not cry about it.

So, what's this got to do with WDTV's?  Well, as you may or may not know, they're *nix based.  Ergo, from the experiences I've seen in the PC/Mac world, they are in a position to not yell and scream at you if you connect a corrupted drive -- they don't say anything and just bash away as best they can.  But, for all I know, using the drive without fixing the file system errors will just make things worse in the long run.  At some point you really do need to repair the file system (whether you know it's borked, or not) or things eventually will start going badly wrong with your data.

It seems as if 1.06.15 is checking for file system errors on boot (or when a drive's attached), from the new behaviours we're seeing, and it looks like it's trying to correct some of them.  I can only guess that it seems to be doing this because file system errors were largely ignored in the past, and would presumably become worse and worse, and data was eventually being lost.

That would seem to explain why some drives (no errors) scan very quickly, and why others take 20 minutes or never finish at all... it would seem to depend on just how corrupt the file system has become, as to how much attempted fixing is necessary.

Of course, I am taking a stab in the dark here, although my guesses seem logical to me based on my observations.

It certainly appears that, if you have a drive that's slow to scan, connecting it to a PC and repairing the file system and then "Safely Remov"ing it and hooking it back up to the WDTV does cut the scan time down to a reasonable amount, in line with the time taken by previous firmwares.

[Rider]

RG, that makes a lot of sense.  A 'disk integrity check' could be the reason some people see long startup times.

Something I've found too, and noted somewhere in here, is to delete the .wd_tv directory from the drive while it's connected to your PC.  The WDTV will re-create it on next power up with the drive attached.  If there were any strange inconsistencies in teh database between version upgrades, this would eliminate them.

[Michelo]

I want to say the same the owner (of this post)  with this firmware [Deleted]. After upgrading it works fine, actually it doesn't. I put in WD with mkv movies, contains movies sizes start 4GB to up and up, everyone only one file, and I when watching it, it only seen 0 bytes into WD' software . I try it to see on other laptops (I am IT network, I know that I am talking about)  and I don't have problem with see it. I doesn't make sense if you say, bla bla integrity and another stuff. THIS FIRMWARE  HAS HUGE HUGE BUG.

Sorry, I am really angry THIS is not big DEAL

[Michelo]

I have forgotten to say when see without problems is when I first see on another laptops, desktops, so I put it IN Wester and I cannot see anymore, values 0 bytes. You have to believed me.

[TonyPh12345]

Same description as before... 

I'm an "IT Network" as well, but I don't claim to be an expert on file systems in linux appliances...

[Michelo]

Obviously, I said that because that only reason I am not newbie (no hacker) I work on linux and windows environment (servers, too).