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My Set Top Box is acting weird (image frozen after a while, specially if I rewind a transmission) so I suspect it's the HDD that could be faulty and because of the Coronavirus pandemic I don't want to schedule a replacement of the whole unit. If it's the HDD I can replace it with one that I have here, but I don't want to lose some of my recordings.

I tried to connect the HDD to my PC but it shows as if it was uninitialized and asks to be initialized either as MBR or GPT. I don't want to initialize it, otherwise I can lose everything inside it, I just want to be able to run chkdsk to search for bad sectors.

I run mountvol and get this:

\\?\Volume{7620f704-0000-0000-0000-100000000000}\
        *** NO MOUNT POINTS ***

Then I tried:

chkdsk "\\?\Volume{7620f704-0000-0000-0000-100000000000} /r

And chkdsk runs in 3 seconds, so clearly it didn't do any bad sectors checks as these tend to take hours.

I am under Windows 10 x64 Update 2004.

Is it there a way to scan it without initializing so I can know if the problem is with the HDD that needs to be replaced or the actual Set Top Box unit?

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  • Is this a product such as Sky or equivalent? Often they have hidden engineer menus where you can perform similar functions from within the box.
    – spikey_richie
    Commented Jul 28, 2020 at 7:04
  • The HDD itself already records identified bad sectors. You can read out the data via S.M.A.R.T as long as you connect the HDD through an interface that let you access this data (SATA -> has to be enabled in PC BIOS, most USB-SATA adapters). Use a tool like CrystalDiskInfo or Smartmontools to read it out.
    – Robert
    Commented Jul 28, 2020 at 7:08
  • I guess it's kind Sky, I think it's made by Cisco, but I tried to find an option like that and didn't succeed... If this was embedded Linux I could even try to really open it and try to get a terminal if it has the pins for it, but I didn't go that far yet and looking online it doesn't seems to be an option.
    – mFeinstein
    Commented Jul 28, 2020 at 7:30
  • @robert yes the first thing I checked was SMART with CrystalDiskInfo and it says the HDD is healthy and the reports look quite similar to my other WD disk, so should I stop there and conclude its the set top box and not the HDD?
    – mFeinstein
    Commented Jul 28, 2020 at 7:32
  • Better check the SMART values directly instead of trusting the overall health result. From my experience the bad sectors raw value is of interest. It is the exact value of detected bad sectors. Typically on a healthy HDD it should be 0. If it is greater 0 (and may be increasing from day to day) the HDD is near to death. If you have a replacement of same size or larger I would make clone it to the replacement disk by a sector-by-sector copy. Most disk-image software support this, alternatively Clonezilla or Linux + dd.
    – Robert
    Commented Jul 28, 2020 at 7:48

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