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Author Topic: Unable to ingest feature from Hard Drive Peter Foyster Expert Film Handler Posts: 102 From: ROLEYSTONE WESTERN AUSTRALIA Registered: Aug 2016 posted 01-05-2019 06:52 AM                     For the first time ever I have loaded a hard drive into the CRU bay on the DSS100 and the content (THE GRINCH) is not recognised. I have no problem loading other titles; It is almost as if the drive was improperly formatted, however I would imagine that other cinemas were able to ingest it before me. I will be referring this issue to DeLuxe and trying to get a replacement drive, however I thought I would check on the forum first in case this is has happened to others. I have the most up to date software on the server. This problem is only with this particular hard drive.  |  IP: Logged Dave Macaulay Film God Posts: 2321 From: Toronto, Canada Registered: Apr 2001 posted 01-05-2019 06:58 AM                     The drives do fail, they get re-used many times and take a lot of abuse in shipping. You can insall a Windows EXT filesystem driver and have a look at the drive. If it mounts and has all the required files... ? Unfortunately the Dolby DSS series do not have a fully functional Linux terminal available to check the CRU drive in place.  |  IP: Logged Jim Cassedy Phenomenal Film Handler Posts: 1661 From: San Francisco, CA Registered: Dec 2006 posted 01-05-2019 09:01 AM                     1)At the risk of asking the obvious- - have you tried re-booting the server? I occasionally get an unrecognized drive on a DSS-200, especially if I'm trying to ingest through the USB port, and not the CRU bay. 2)What Dave says. I've got Pagargon EXT-FS running on the booth MAC, and it comes in handy for diagnosing occasional drive problems. Drives from major distributors work almost 99.9% of the time. But I find being able to examine the drives on the MAC settles a lot of issues when running festivals where some of the film-makers bring in content that doesn't work. 3) I've also got a good, dedicated "DCP Verification" program that automatically examines DCP drives/files and diagnoses any errors found. When I bought it several years ago, the program was only about $100, and I got a lifetime license to use it. Unfortunately, the company has since changed it's marketing structure & now the program is only available on a subscription basis for $150/year. - but it's a very handy tool to have, especially if you deal with with a lot of DCP's from "non-professional" sources.  |  IP: Logged Leo Enticknap Film God Posts: 7474 From: Loma Linda, CA Registered: Jul 2000 posted 01-05-2019 10:18 AM                        Certainly on the 200 and 220, what can sometimes happen is that if you forget to dismount a CRU drive (press the gray button on the side of the CRU reader and wait for the light to go out, before unlatching and pulling the cartridge) before pulling it, the server won't see any subsequent ones that are inserted until after a reboot. Given that this is a 100, which hasn't had any software updates in 2.5 years, it's just possible that this is an SMPTE DCP that uses a newer feature that the DSS100 can't cope with, but for that mainstream a movie, I'd be surprised. For reading DCP drives on a PC, I prefer to use a dual boot Windows/CentOS or Windows/Ubuntu computer, so that I can read ext2 and ext3 using a native Linux-based OS, rather than a Windows or Mac OS-based addon for reading ext2 or ext3. With ext3 in particular, if drives are not dismounted in exactly the right way, they can't be opened again in any other computer. I had multiple problems with ext2FS for Windows over this, and concluded as a result that using a native Linux-based operating system was the only truly safe way to handle Linux-formatted drives.  |  IP: Logged Frank Cox Film God Posts: 2234 From: Melville Saskatchewan Canada Registered: Apr 2011 posted 01-05-2019 10:19 AM                        Do you have one of those "boots" that you can use to hook up the drive to a USB port on your server? If so, try that. I've done that a few times when I received a hard drive where the case was slightly bent such that it wouldn't slide into the slot on the server.  |  IP: Logged Stephan Shelley Jedi Master Film Handler Posts: 854 From: castro valley, CA, usa Registered: Nov 2014 posted 01-05-2019 01:52 PM                     A DSS/DSP 100 can do SMPTE packages as long as you are running the latest software. I do it all the time. As Leo says the latest is 2.5 years old. 4.7.8. I suspect a bad drive as this is the only one not loading. Did you try using a sleeve and the USB port? Drives do go bad.  |  IP: Logged Peter Foyster Expert Film Handler Posts: 102 From: ROLEYSTONE WESTERN AUSTRALIA Registered: Aug 2016 posted 01-05-2019 08:14 PM                     The software was upgraded to the most up to date just before the start of the season. I also ran the SMPTE test successfully. I have ingested about 18 titles since the season started in November, some of which, I imagine, were SMPTE. I ingested one package successfully yesterday and checked another drive after the failed one, which brought up the content. I did not have time to do further ingests before the start of the show. I will reboot the server this afternoon and try again, but in the meantime I will request that another drive be made available. I guess one faulty drive in 3 years is not bad.  |  IP: Logged Leo Enticknap Film God Posts: 7474 From: Loma Linda, CA Registered: Jul 2000 posted 01-06-2019 12:02 AM                        If you were able to mount another drive after the suspect one and see CPLs on it, that would rule out the drive not dismounted properly bug that a reboot fixes. This all does point to a bad drive. As you say, one bad one in three years is livable with. In the 35mm houses I worked in the '90s and early '00s, one unshowable print every 2-3 months (severe damage, reel missing, wrong movie delivered, etc.) was about the norm.  |  IP: Logged Peter Foyster Expert Film Handler Posts: 102 From: ROLEYSTONE WESTERN AUSTRALIA Registered: Aug 2016 posted 01-06-2019 06:58 AM                     Well, I did mount another drive yesterday after this one failed and it displayed the content. Today I rebooted the server and successfully ingested the content from the "faulty" drive. Would someone care to venture a technical explanation as to why a reboot would fix the problem, assuming that the drive was not actually faulty (or is it???)? Just curious, is all.  |  IP: Logged Carsten Kurz Film God Posts: 4340 From: Cologne, NRW, Germany Registered: Aug 2009 posted 01-06-2019 07:19 AM                     Just he usual IT Voodoo, I guess... - Carsten  |  IP: Logged Peter Foyster Expert Film Handler Posts: 102 From: ROLEYSTONE WESTERN AUSTRALIA Registered: Aug 2016 posted 01-06-2019 07:24 AM                     Can you dumb that down a bit, Carsten?  |  IP: Logged Carsten Kurz Film God Posts: 4340 From: Cologne, NRW, Germany Registered: Aug 2009 posted 01-06-2019 07:40 AM                     I don't know, Peter. While distribution drives should all be formatted the same way (ext2/ext3), essentially, ext2/ext3 still has many options which 'usually' are not important. Also, not all hard discs behave exactly the same during mount and unmount, spin up and down. This one may have been a bit special. What goes on when inserting a drive is complex, as you are not dealing with the drive on the operating system level, but on the DSS100 GUI level. So, wether the drive actually could not be mounted on the system level, or the ShowManager software for some reason could not detect the content is hard to tell. Due to system complexity, these things happen. e.g. on the notebook I am writing this, ejecting a USB stick sometimes works immediately, sometimes it takes minutes to become effective. Same stick, same system. Software behaviour is far from being simple nowadays, as it relies on systems using subsystems using subsystems using subsystems using subsystems using drivers using options etc... One known common behaviour on many DCI server systems is that you should give the server some time after ejecting an ingest drive before inserting a new drive. A colleague once ordered a new DCP drive after his Doremi would not mount a new drive after many tries, and he simply had forgotten that rule, he was impatient and didn't follow the simple rule to first reboot. Don't spend too much time thinking about it. Rebooting fixes many things, as it resets stuck functions. May be, for the fun of it, try to insert that specific drive a few more times in the coming days and see what happens. Chances are high it is always recognized then. On a side note, same colleague uses a NEC NC900 projector. Every few months, it comes up with a CommE DLP error and fails functioning. A power down/up cycle always solves it. This issue remains over many NEC software updates in recent years. Why it does that, and why following this schedule, nobody knows. But it seems there are some things going on on that machine that triggers it only after some time span or after a certain number of power cycles. We don't investigate, we do what is the easiest procedure to get it going. - Carsten  |  IP: Logged Peter Foyster Expert Film Handler Posts: 102 From: ROLEYSTONE WESTERN AUSTRALIA Registered: Aug 2016 posted 01-06-2019 09:40 AM                     Thanks Carsten, So it would seem to be something not to get too concerned about. Cheers Peter  |  IP: Logged Leo Enticknap Film God Posts: 7474 From: Loma Linda, CA Registered: Jul 2000 posted 01-07-2019 08:09 AM                        Agreed with Carsten, to which all I would add is that DSS servers do have a habit of acting up if a drive is not dismounted properly before being pulled (CRU), or if it is pulled during a read or write operation (USB). In almost all cases, a reboot fixes it. In my experience, ext3 volumes are more touchy about proper dismounting than ext2. This is probably because ext3 is a journaling file system, i.e. it keeps a log on the drive which records which computers have accessed it, read to it, and written to it, and precisely what has been done. This journal needs to be closed out properly when the drive is dismounted (equivalent to closing a book, I guess), before being physically disconnected. If it isn't, the serious risk exists that you won't be able to mount it in any other device unless you repair it (run the Linux fsck utility) first. As an experiment once, I made a DCP drive containing exactly the same CPL in two copies, one of them ext2 and the other ext3. They were both created on the same computer and operating system (Ubuntu 16.04 LTS, with the MBR created by GPartEd and then the filesystem with an ext2fs command line, to the ISDCF spec, then the content written by Nautilus). The ext2 one survived quite a lot of abuse, including being yanked from servers mid-ingest. The ext3 one did not. One particular gotcha was with the GDC SX-3000, whereby if I didn't press the "close" button on the GUI before pulling the ext3 drive from the USB jack, then - even if no read or write operation was in progress at the time - I couldn't get that drive to mount in any of the other three servers I tried (DolRemi ShowVault, Barco Alchemy, and a DSS200). For this reason, whenever I make DCP drives for others, I always use ext2, despite the official advice being that ext3 is preferable (but 2 allowable).  |  IP: Logged

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