[southsloper52]

Hi all, I have a Shaw Gateway (6-tuner, XG1v3) purchased from London Drugs 2016/7-ish time frame -- now 2021 during COVID, it's way out of warranty and the hard drive has failed.

Symptoms: in a "boot loop" displayed Elevate logo. The hard drive making a seek/retry noise pattern when booting indicating drive had probably failed.

A Shaw tech did house call & observing it wouldn't boot, just said it was dead and he couldn't do anything with it.

I opened it up & tested by plugging in a working SATA drive I had and found the PVR booted & was semi-working (can access menus, clock updates, can access/view VOD content, but no program listing downloads, can't view a live channel, could see my list of scheduled recordings).

So I ordered a "pull out" WD5000LUCT SATA drive from eBay, I plugged it into an external dock and my Windows 10 laptop could see/access it so assuming it's working (tried as-is, also removing all partititions, quick-format as exFAT) but nothing happens when it's plugged in the XG1v3 (thought it might ask if I wanted to format it (or would ask if detected, etc).

I found the Installer's Menu access on the forum this morning, and see it's communicating with Shaw, but I don't see a "format drive" menu item.

So now what? Contact Shaw to see if they can remotely format the drive? Or need to come on site? a 3rd party solution? Any advice/help welcome

 

[Tmr]

These PVRs don't use standard file systems like exFAT, NTFS, EXT4, etc... What it actually is I haven't been able to figure out. Hopefully if your old hard drive still spins up, you can clone it to your new drive. You must use a sector-by-sector copy application like gddrescue (Some disk cloning software clone used disk space only, which is not what you want). Sector-by-sector copy doesn't care what file system it is, or whether the drive is 1% full or 100% full, it will copy exactly what is on the source disk. Even if your old drive has bad sectors, gddrescue can skip them and continue cloning, and it should give you an exact duplicate of your source drive.

Note gddrescue is a Linux program. If you're not familiar with Linux, there are hardware cloning devices that can do the same thing. Just google: hard drive docking station clone

Hopefully that'll work for you. Please report back here your results!

 

[southsloper52]

Thanks for the feedback. I will file away "gddrescue" for future reference (I have run Linux before). I'm hoping a Shaw or other tech-in-the-know will pop up & reveal how to build a new (replacement) drive image or whatever so I can restore the PVR to full functionality...

57 - Unnecessary Quote Removed.

 

[Jimsathome]

Wow Gents!

I thought someone here would have this all sorted by now.

I too have a Gateway system (which my wife loves) and think it's internal Hard Drive can't last too much longer. However, we have a separate much larger external Hard Drive as I remember, and the actual recordings (please correct me if I'm wrong here) are put there until it starts to get near full. I was hoping this would increase the lifespan of the internal Hard Drive. We rarely get near 50% capacity and normally it's down in the teens.

 

[mrgordos]

I used Linux mint and connected my old external drive as well as a new external drive, then used the Linux mint terminal to follow this guys instructions on the Shaw gateway forum on the Shaw forums. This copied all my recordings from the old drive to the new drive (went to a much bigger drive) Not sure if this would work for the internal drive or not.
mkdir /mnt
mkdir /mnt/gatewayold

losetup -o 4096 /dev/loop8 /dev/sdb
mount /dev/loop8 /mnt/gatewayold

mkdir /mnt/gatewaynew

losetup -o 4096 /dev/loop9 /dev/sdc
mount /dev/loop9 /mnt/gatewaynew


Haven't tried using the internal drive.. This was what I needed to copy the data from my old external drive to my new one. I suspect it should be similar.

 

[southsloper52]

Thanks @mrgodos. I'd seen this linux disc copy procedure in another post. Unfortunately making a COPY of an external PVR drive to a second drive, is not what I need. Also, the internal drive (WD5000LUCT) was dead which caused the PVR boot cycling. Removing it or plugging in a working SATA drive allowed the PVR to boot. Everything works (I can watch Shaw On Demand content) but the Program Guide doesn't download (and "Resources" as seen on an Installer's screen). The Dashboard & Diagnostic screens show errors for those, but everything else seems to be working.

At this point I will have to call Shaw Support to see if they can fix the Program Guide/Resource download problem. And if they can initialize the internal drive remotely or not (or dispatch a tech or tell me how to do it).