A300 various common issues and problems

[theother]

I got my A300 a few days ago and these are my initial findings:

1) My WD 3TB drive is not recognized (the wiki says that it should). I had to put the drive in my PC, format it, then install it on the A300 (which would still couldn't recognize). Then I read somewhere that I had to take a USB flash drive, copy the NMT apps file in it, then reboot the A300 and use that to format the drive and install NMT apps, which finally got my drive detected and working.

2) Some market apps aren't working for me, for example TED shows the movie thumbnails but doesn't play any of them.

3) When booting the A300, it sometimes fails to initialize the harddrive! I have to reboot a few times before it does.

4) I copied a few movies and the interface was very fast, but once I filled the drive with 2TB of movies, the interface is very slow. I have a suspicion that the 3TB drive wasn't properly formatted to align to 4K? can anyone confirm this please?

5) Overall the A300 is much better than my C200. Unfortunately, it is still overpriced, considering all the problems bugs and issues that we have to go through in order to watch a movie. If I wanted to bother with so many problems, I would have used
a simple home PC with MythTV on it. I am rather disappointed.

6) I would also like to add that the included transmission version is rather old and the newer ones have fixed important GUI problems with the web interface. Maybe worth upgrading?

7) Forwarding/Reversing the movie causes my subtitles to get out of synch. Very important problem!!!

Thank you.

[chris57]

Many PC's cannot format 3Tb HDD's correctly, google it. So are you sure your PC did?

If you install the NMT Apps on a 3Tb HDD then you only get 2.19Tb of space. A 3Tb HDD formatted to NTFS can be read. Any NTFS formatted HDD will take a long time for the file listings to appear if it has a lot of data or files on it. Use EXT if speed is a concern.

Transmission v2.13 is the NMT Apps version. I asked about an update not because of any phantom ui issues but because of magnet links. The Transmission developer apparently suggested v2.13 for stability.

All of your issues apart from TED/Subtitles could be down to your choice and format of the 3Tb HDD. The subtitle issue is known and being worked on.

Glad you enjoyed the A300 and think its much better than the C200 nice to see a balanced post.

[theother]

I already have several 4K "green" drives and my Fedora Linux can format them and align the sectors properly. I've already done this for my C200.

I formatted the drive in ext3 and as you mentioned, I see a bit less disk space (2.7Tb to be exact).

Well, my transmission issues are not phantom, since version 2.50 they have corrected some issues with jQuery and multiple selected torrents (new version aggregates results). Hopefully the developers will give the new 2.5x releases a try, unless they have specific stability issues that they should report to the transmission developers.

Why would my harddrive be an issue? I selected the one reported in the wiki to work with A300. Can you please be a little bit more specific on what could be wrong?

[accident]

3tb+ drives have so many quirks, especially how they come preformatted for computers that really shouldn't be able to support them.. Sometimes this gets in the way of the pch but most have been able to reformat outside of hte pch to clear that up. Unfortunately I never paid attention to those posts to say exactly how and what settings they have used for that.

[theother]

1) So you blame the harddrive? Is that the same kind of "blame" that you threw at the C200 gigabit ethernet? If I remember correctly, instead of admitting that the C200 had broken gigabit ethernet, you blamed our switches. So this sounds like the same thing, instead of admitting that the A300 doesn't properly support some harddrives, you blame the harddrive.

2) I didn't get an answer why TED doesn't show anything. Are the videos limited by region?

3) Subtitles is one of the most important aspects of a player these days, people will not buy this device once they read about the problems. I hope they fix them soon.

[chris57]

I feel a victim coming on, there are none so blind as those who cannot see

Google 3Tb HDDs as I said earlier and you will very quickly see that UEFI motherboards running W7 can do it without problems. Other boards and OS's require adaptations. Put the energy you spend in posting the negatives into educating yourself rather than assuming incorrectly that anyone 'blames' the HDD and that the C200 has abroken gigabit connection, it works great on my hardware!

Remember you are asking your fellow owners for help. You have no right of reply on any question or post. This is NOT PCH customer service!

[theother]

(06-18-2012 02:58 PM)chris57 Wrote:  Google 3Tb HDDs as I said earlier and you will very quickly see that UEFI motherboards running W7 can do it without problems. Other boards and OS's require adaptations. Put the energy you spend in posting the negatives into educating yourself rather than assuming incorrectly that anyone 'blames' the HDD and that the C200 has abroken gigabit connection, it works great on my hardware!

Is that what they have told you to say? Because I clearly remember Syabas coming out and admitting that the C200 gigabit ethernet was a fiasco, which eventually led them to change the website info to warn people that gigabit support "depends" on the switch/router. I also remember them saying how the chipset wasn't powerful enough to drive the higher gigabit speeds and that is why nobody runs at gigabit speeds even if the connection is gigabit.

So lets be clear about that and not write amusing silly stories that may lead users to believe that the C200 actually has gigabit ethernet.

The harddrive is a 3TB drive, if you write that it is supported then there should be no "ifs" or "buts" or "special compatibility hardware list". You are either pregnant or you are not, anything in between is a fiasco, like the gigabit ethernet fiasco.

Why not just say that 3TB drives are not yet supported by they will be supported in a future firmware? That would be a much better policy and users would be a lot happier.

The A300 is truly a super device: small in size, fast menus, nice interface and with loads of features. Unfortunately, a few serious issues cause havoc (harddrive not detected, subttitles, etc).

[halfelite]

^^ the blame is on the wd that are pre formatted with support for windows xp. Remember windows xp stops at 2tb but hd manufactures found a way to format it specially to work on windows xp as well as windows 7+. Its the same thing that happened when WD would include that stupid pre installed software that shows up as a cd partition would throw a lot of devices that were not windows off as they assumed it was a cdrom as thats what the first partition said. So yes some of the blame can be put on HD manufactures and yes some of the blame could be on PCH as there is work Arounds to get around these issues so the user does not have to. Hence when you use the WD format tool there as an option that says "MOST compatible" And its not the xp mode. I have a feeling XP mode does some MBR/GPT hacks to get that xp support

And technically the NIC inside the C200 is gigabit now the throughput on the other hand is a max of 200mbit. And we all know any computer specs are always blown way out of proportion in advertising so not sure why the pch is any different then any other company in that aspect.

As for subtitles I agree that issues needs fixing ASAP, And as for TED no clue never used it

[theother]

halfelite, when I put the harddrive in the A300, the NMT application installer formats the harddrive in a custom layout (3 or 4 partitions?), is that right? At least that is what happened on my A300, so the layout that the drive came with is really irrelevant?

[accident]

Don't put words in my mouth....

It's not the drive, it's the way manufacturers started to format 3tb+ drives without using GPT (MBR). GPT is the partitioning table designed for larger than 2tb drives for the new 4K sectors. the PCH fully supports greater than 2tb drives with GPT. MBR doesn't support >2tb drives but the hack fools older computer that can't support it to work.

At some point the linux world including syabas will be able to react to this and it'll be a put in the drive and enjoy situation, until then you can reformat the drive as GPT in a computer. BUT you need to switch it to GPT which is the newer partitioning table for 3tb+ drives. Just formatting it leaves it MBR and doesn't help.

This is something new that drive makers have started to do, it's not even a couple months old and it's causing all types of problems not just in players.

[halfelite]

(06-18-2012 05:51 PM)theother Wrote:  halfelite, when I put the harddrive in the A300, the NMT application installer formats the harddrive in a custom layout (3 or 4 partitions?), is that right? At least that is what happened on my A300, so the layout that the drive came with is really irrelevant?

That is correct, So everything should be working now but its one of the main issues with the pch seeing the drive. If it formatted it should be all correct. If you want to double check that 4k was picked right you can always hook the drive up to another machine and run gparted on it to see if its 4k aligned but it should be and it will also tell you if its GPT or MBR. If its still MBR you will have trouble. If its GPT and not 4k you will get slow downs if its GPT and alligned its all good. In gparted of fdisk just check the starting number if its divisible by 8 then its aligned correctly And if I remember right pch still uses fdisk to format drives so there is a possibility it was kept MBR

[theother]

accident & halfelite,

I understand the argument but I still believe that the website (or the box itself) should warn users about 3TB drivers. The wiki page stating that the WD 3TB drive is fully working is misleading. A nice warning would help users make a decision about their harddrive and if they are advanced enough they may go for 3TB and play around with the partitions.

The fdisk in the A300 (busybox as far as i know) doesn't display all the partitions, it gives me the following output:

Code:

sh-3.00# fdisk /dev/sda

The number of cylinders for this disk is set to 364801.
There is nothing wrong with that, but this is larger than 1024,
and could in certain setups cause problems with:
1) software that runs at boot time (e.g., old versions of LILO)
2) booting and partitioning software from other OSs
   (e.g., DOS FDISK, OS/2 FDISK)

Command (m for help): p

Disk /dev/sda: 3000.5 GB, 3000592982016 bytes
255 heads, 63 sectors/track, 364801 cylinders
Units = cylinders of 16065 * 512 = 8225280 bytes

   Device Boot      Start         End      Blocks  Id System
/dev/sda1               1      267350  2147483647+ ee EFI GPT

Command (m for help): quit

Since I can clearly see "GPT" there, I would imagine that everything is correct?

Thank you for the explanations, much appreciated.

[halfelite]

do

fdisk -l /dev/sda it will give the good printout

[accident]

the wiki is user made so feel free to add in a comment to clarify it. use your forum login.

[theother]

(06-18-2012 07:28 PM)halfelite Wrote:  do

fdisk -l /dev/sda it will give the good printout

Here is the output, which seems the same as the above, does that mean something is wrong?

Code:

sh-3.00# fdisk -l /dev/sda

Disk /dev/sda: 3000.5 GB, 3000592982016 bytes
255 heads, 63 sectors/track, 364801 cylinders
Units = cylinders of 16065 * 512 = 8225280 bytes

   Device Boot      Start         End      Blocks  Id System
/dev/sda1               1      267350  2147483647+ ee EFI GPT
sh-3.00#

---

(06-18-2012 07:50 PM)accident Wrote:  the wiki is user made so feel free to add in a comment to clarify it. use your forum login.

That sounds like a good idea, I'll go ahead and add a warning. Thanks for the tip.

---

It seems like the fdisk command in the A300 is not giving me realistic results, so I removed the drive and hooked it to my Fedora box, which gives me the following results:

Code:

# gdisk /dev/sde
GPT fdisk (gdisk) version 0.7.1

Partition table scan:
  MBR: protective
  BSD: not present
  APM: not present
  GPT: present

Found valid GPT with protective MBR; using GPT.

Command (? for help): p
Disk /dev/sde: 5860533168 sectors, 2.7 TiB
Logical sector size: 512 bytes
Disk identifier (GUID): C57C0C61-420F-4847-A6CF-0A8ECB2CCBAA
Partition table holds up to 128 entries
First usable sector is 34, last usable sector is 5860533134
Partitions will be aligned on 2048-sector boundaries
Total free space is 2014 sectors (1007.0 KiB)

Number  Start (sector)    End (sector)  Size       Code  Name
   1            2048         1955839   954.0 MiB   0700  
   2         1955840         2957311   489.0 MiB   8200  
   3         2957312         6864895   1.9 GiB     0700  
   4         6864896      5860533134   2.7 TiB     0700

Everything seems good to me, the drive has a proper GPT partitioning (with MBR fallback) and all partitions are aligned in 2048 sector boundaries (divisible by 8).

Please let me know if you see something wrong here.