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SOLVED The file that wont die!

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King107s

Member
Joined
Oct 27, 2008
OK so I use a Seagate FreeAgent Home Theater HD + to stream media from my external hard drive and internet to my home theater system.

Recently it unexpectedly crashed and upon restart it would no longer scan the files on the external drive. Normally, upon boot it creates and index file on the external drive for all the movies on it. Occasionally this file has to be deleted so it will properly update and when its being created new again it takes a minute or so to index the entire drive. So I deleted the old index file and got the FA box booted back up for it to attempt to index for a couple of seconds and then report that no files were found.

The external drive and cables are working perfectly and have been tested.

So I reflashed the firmware of the FreeAgent Home Theater HD + with the most current v2.23 FW (the same FW it already had) via same USB port and usb stick from the menu and then the 'cold boot' method. Both times the firmware updated normally and the box seemed to behave normally but still wouldn't index the files on the external drive.

Oh and here is an odd thing I noticed, the .Theater index file has a creation/modified date of 7/20/2016.... So somehow the system thinks its from the future.

Then when the external drive was only connected to my computer and the FreeAgent Home Theater HD + was unplugged sitting on the desk I noticed that the .Theater index file had reappeared.

So I tried to delete it only to get an error as if it didn't exist. So I SHIFT+Delete it and it went away only to reappear the second the drive was refreshed. I tried this again from safemode and same thing... But this whole time the FreeAgent box is not connected and there is no software installed that controls it so I have no idea why this ghost file keeps coming back.

I even went into to the folder properties and enabled viewing of protected system files and then went into the actual recycle bin and confirmed that it was indeed completely gone from the system but some how it keeps getting generated.

I have a thread going here on the Seagate forums but I'm fairly certain this is not related to the Seagate FreeAgent Home Theater HD +. I think its getting messed up by this file already being present when it tries to index.

Any ideas?
 
No one has any ideas how to stop this file from getting generated or even how to figure out how its getting generated? Like I said before, it doesn't look like its actually a whole file, rather a ghost of a deleted file or something because it has no size and can't be normally deleted...
 
Hey bud,

I'm not familiar with your system but I'm familiar with those random issues. Just give it a shot to these 2 things.

First, try to repair the file system of the drive in a computer.

Second, try (if possible) formatting the drive.

Let me know how it goes, maybe we can figure something else out.

The issue I had was with my ntfs drive connected to my dark night router. I had to repair it everytime until I formatted it in ext3 and all my issues were gone. That could be an option if your device supports it.
 
Other than this one odd ball file the external array seems to be working great so I'm not sure if a 'repair' is in order (or safe?)... I have so much data on the array that I don't have enough storage to back up the data for a reformat :( Not sure how I'm going to handle that. I'm not about to drop big bucks on several more hard drives and an enclosure to back up but I may need to in the future.

Edit: Something I just thought of.... maybe the Seagate box won't update the file because it thinks the index is 'newer' because of the futuristic creation date. I wounder if I tell the hardware the date is later than the existing ghost index file it will overwrite it with a good copy... Its something I'll give a try when i get home.
 
I've seen things similar to this before.

The file creation date could be related to an incorrect date set in the bios (seen that a few times).

As for this "ghost file" I've seen things like that before too, I had to stop one of my systems from doing that by running a registry cleaner to clean out the records of old non-existent files. That may be an option for you here.
 
Checkdisk /f worked! It was able to get rid of the ghost file without messing up the array (I was sweating bullets because the system froze up for a minute or so and then came back to life and proceeded).
 
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