Another (possible) WD HD failure

[hemicuda]

Looks like my D drive is going down; 200GB pata. Event Viewer is giving me a ton of drive not ready errors. On top of that, the system will not complete a startup cycle without rebooting itself as if I'd hit the reset button. I got the Sage service disabled, but that didn't make a difference on the reboot issue. Thought maybe Sage accessing the drive was causing it. I can still get a solid boot in safe mode so maybe I can get the files off of it after a trip to BestBuy for an emergency replacement. Going to grab a USB backup device while I'm there. My OS drive is a WD that I think is older than the 200. Zone Alarm's TrueVector service and my UPS software are also showing errors in EV.

I'm gonna grab some Seagate drives since they're on sale. Doubt I'll ever buy WD stuff again. They used to be the only drive I'd buy.

[AngelofDeth]

I've had so many WDs fail over the last 5 years, its redicolous. Mostly the 200GB pata. Their 100GB have been much more reliable. One of the RAIDs I was using for SageTV recently more or less had two of the 200s go out at the same time. (resulted in having to format/rebuild it)

[sainswor99]

I refuse to buy WD after the last two crashes; I lost 5 years of photos (always check your backups). It's a shame, too, because WD used to be the leader in HD manufacturing.

[hemicuda]

ok, according to a file copy I just timed it's going to take about 12hrs to copy 152gig over to the usb drive so I can replace the 'bad' HD. I really don't want to wait that long to fire Sage up again. If I just unplug it and restart Sage will it delete those shows from the database? I'm sure I'll have time to do the transfer proper at a later date. How long will it retain the data in wiz.bin? I figure I'll use the usb drive as temporary storage til I can get everything organized w/ the new 400gig pata.

When the recording schedule permits I'll shut down Sage, move the programs to the new pata drive (fixed as D: of course) and restart Sage. D is the failing drive btw. If I understand things Sage will reconnect all the files if the same drive letter and paths are maintained.

Is there a way to force XP to format using 64k clusters? I could only get it to go to 4k when I formatted the usb drive to ntfs.

[Opus4]

Originally Posted by hemicuda

If I just unplug it and restart Sage will it delete those shows from the database? I'm sure I'll have time to do the transfer proper at a later date. How long will it retain the data in wiz.bin?

If the drive isn't visible to SageTV at all, it will keep the recordings.

To prevent v6.0 from removing airing info when it sees the recordings aren't aren't on the drive, set wizard/disable_maintenance=true. Version 6.1 should keep airing info for all shows recorded, so it shouldn't remove it all all from the database even w/o that property setting.

Is there a way to force XP to format using 64k clusters?

Yes, but it has been so long since I did it, I can't remember the details... I just figured I would say it can be done.

- Andy

[hemicuda]

Thanks for the quick response. I found it under Disk Management. Right-click in Explorer won't do it. Might also have had something to do w/ me deleting the partition

I'm going to of course back up the wiz.* just in case. I just hope the 'offending' drive is my only problem. I even rolled back the nvidia driver that's been running stable for the last 2 days just in case.

My problems started when I tried to VNC into the server to check my email. sheesh.

[hemicuda]

All is not well in Mudville. I unplugged the drive that I thought was failing and still get the reboot and the event error "\device\harddisk1\d is not ready for access yet"

that leaves a SATA and the 120g WD OS drive to be causing the problem. guess I'll unplug the SATA and see what happens. It's a newer Seagate. If it's the OS this couldn't have happened at a worse time. I have til about 7am to get it rebuilt.

XP is only seeing the drive as 132,000MB. motherboard sees it as a 400. guess it'll have to do til I can spend more time on it.

Edit: ok, XP pre-SP1 only recognizes 120GB partitions/drives. After I up'd to SP2 it now displays a 240-ish GB unallocated partition. Kudos to the design team... Sage picked up where it left off w/o a hitch. Did a fresh install then copied the old folders/files over top of it. Now I can plan a sequence of getting the 200GB backed up and designated as the OS drive.