New Toshiba MK1231GAL not working

[sordup]

Ah. Well yes, it's just that I've never got networking (therefor no internet) to work with the Knoppix liveCD. It tries to connect but fails.
I will try to figure this out and to follow your instructions and see what happens.
Continuing thanks for your time.

[Chronon]

Try connecting via ethernet. 

[sordup]

I am connected via ethernet, assuming you mean by cable, i.e. not over wireless.

[torne]

You could plug in a usb flash drive and copy the log files to there, and then upload them from your regular OS.

[sordup]

@torne - followed your Linux instructions with my Knoppix LiveCD, got a kernel log but wasn't sure, from your example, what "device name" to use for hdparm. I tried several. It saw my disk and identified it correctly as a TOSHIBA MK1231GAL with its sectors and size. That name, however, yielded nothing in hdparm.

Unfortunately (I remember this from using this liveCD before) I am unable to write anything to any disc from within Knoppix (as if I don't have privileges or something), so I could not save the kernellog.txt to transfer it to this machine. And, as I said before, no networking or internet, so the best I could do is take a photo of the appropriate part of the log where it scans and identifies the drive. What followed this point in the log was a long series of I/O errors up to the end of log. I saw nothing within square brackets.

Don't know if this is any help. I'd like to help settle this issue for other users, but I did find out that my RMA request has been excepted on the drive so I'll be sending it back soon. If I can do anything else in a reasonably short amount of time I'd be happy to before I send it back.

[torne]

The device name there is sdb, which it mentions on virtually every line
So, run hdparm -i /dev/sdb (and with -I as well as I mentioned in my other post).

What were you trying to write the files to? You probably won't have write access to your hard drive which is why I suggested you should plug in a USB flash drive. Any removable device you plug in while in knoppix should work fine.

The log there shows that the device gets detected, its partition table is read successfully, and it's probably trying to automount it when it gets some IO errors on sectors some distance into the drive. So, the drive is at least partly working fine; it's returning some valid data when accessed. It doesn't sound like it should be hard to get it to work; perhaps the sector size is not what we expect and exposing it over usb with 512 byte sectors is causing a problem.

Other than running hdparm we are probably into needing to experiment with changes to rockbox, so I'm not sure you can do much more. If you're going to return the drive I'd still like to see the hdparm output. If you did send it to an interested dev I am about 95% sure it can be made to work with Rockbox fairly easily.

[sordup]

OK. Tried again.
Yes sdb is mentioned on almost every line. I tried that the last time as well. I was looking for a name in square brackets, though, as you seemed to indicate. No matter...

So I tried again. This time the drive showed up on the Knoppix desktop. Clicking on it yielded the following:

"Could not mount device. - mount:I could not determine the filesystem type, and none was specified"

I ran terminal and got the kernel log (see attached. this time I got a flash drive. I didn't have one before.)

I then ran:
"sudo hdparm -i /dev/sdb > hdparm1.txt"
it yielded
"HDIO_GET_IDENTITY failed: Invalid argument"

ran
"sudo hdparm -I /dev/sdb > hdparm2.txt"
yielded
"HDIO_DRIVE_CMD(identify) failed: Invalid argument"


For shits and giggles, cuz I don't know what I'm doing, I ran:
"hdparm -i /dev/sdb > hdparm1.txt"
yielded
"/dev/sdb: Permission denied"
and
"hdparm -I /dev/sdb > hdparm2.txt"
yielded
"/dev/sdb: Permission denied"

Needless to say, no hdparm text files were written.

[torne]

Right, that's very similar output. It looks like maybe hdparm isn't able to do it over usb, I've never tried that... or possibly the failed automount has messed something up.

It's not going to be particularly easy for you to get further then, unless someone else has a different suggestion. If you're returning it then that's the problem solved for you.

Thanks for trying, this is more information than we had before: the disk responds fairly normally and sector 0 is readable, so it's a sign that the problem is something fairly easy to resolve: probably sector size magic similar to the other ipod drive...

[sordup]

OK then. Thanks for the hand with figuring that much out. I suppose I will try my luck with another drive.