SageTV.exe pins CPU to 100%

[heavylee]

I'm hoping somebody knows of a painless solution. My house had a power failure tonight, then it came back on 30 minutes later. I have the BIOS of the computer set to power the machine back on after a power disruption. When the machine booted back up tonight, SageTV was very slow to respond to any of my StreamZap remote commands. It turns out that in the Task Manager, SageTV.exe is pinning the CPU at 100%.

I tried rebooting the computer, I tried shutting down SageTV then relaunching, I tried repairing the installation of Sage from the original CD. Nothing has worked. I have backups of the Wiz.bin and sage.properties files, and about 80GBs of recorded content. I'm hoping that I can salvage the installation so that I don't loose the 80GBs of content and the list of all my favorites and watched shows.

Any ideas? What if I were to rename the video folder, uninstall/reinstall Sage, copy my wiz.bin and sage.properties files overtop the brand new versions, then copy back the video content? Would that work?

Sage computer:
Dell Precision 330
1.4GHZ P4
512MB RAM
200GB IDE HD
WinXP Pro SP2
SageTV 2.0.20

[Opus4]

When the power went out, did the system just crash? It could have corrupted some file(s) SageTV uses.

I would try moving the current properties files and their .autobackup copies to another dir and try reconfiguring SageTV so that you start with a fresh properties file. You could try w/o the current wiz.bin too, to see what happens. If you end up needing to restore an older copy of either of those files, you will want one from before the power outage.

You can also enable debug logging to see what the log contains.

- Andy

[heavylee]

Originally Posted by Opus4

When the power went out, did the system just crash? It could have corrupted some file(s) SageTV uses.

Yes, the system just shut off. I don't have a UPS on it.

Originally Posted by Opus4

I would try moving the current properties files and their .autobackup copies to another dir and try reconfiguring SageTV so that you start with a fresh properties file. You could try w/o the current wiz.bin too, to see what happens.

Could you explain in detail how to do what you are suggesting. It sounds like a good idea to me, but I don't know exactly which files to backup. Do you mean, after backing up the needed files, uninstall/reinstall Sage?

[sainswor99]

Originally Posted by heavylee

Yes, the system just shut off. I don't have a UPS on it.

Not wanting to rub salt in a wound or anything, but to quote Adam Savage (of Mythbusters): "There's your problem." After you resolve the corrupted Sage installation (which sounds painful), go spend the 30 bucks and buy a UPS. Sage is constantly writing information to the hard drive (which if you are using XP has write caching enabled by default), and is therefore susceptible to hard crashes (like most programs). Sounds like you found out the hard way.

Sorry to hear about your troubles.

Stu

[heavylee]

Originally Posted by sainswor99

After you resolve the corrupted Sage installation (which sounds painful), go spend the 30 bucks and buy a UPS.

Yeah, the thought has occurred to me. I've thought about it before, but just 'never got around to it'. Not that it makes it any better, but the power has gone off occasionally before, and didn't cause the problem.

I'm thinking I might take this opportunity to nuke the HD and start a fresh XP install. It's been about 3 years, so it might be time. But I'd like to make sure that my recorded shows and the config files that keep all my settings, watched shows, and favorites are saved.

So does this sounds like a plausible plan:
- Make backup copies of the Sage config files that hold the information I want to carry over. Please could someone tell me the paths of all these files so I get them all?
- I have 2 separate HDs, OS is on C, Sage is installed on D; so I'll temporarily disconnect the slave HD to make sure I don't delete the Sage videos.
- Delete the partition on C, recreate it, install WinXP again, all security patches, my AV, TightVNC, and all the other stuff.
- Reconnect the D drive and rename the video directory to protect it from being overwritten when I install Sage.
- Reinstall Sage, then re-rename the video directory back and overwrite the Sage config files with the ones that I saved.

Will this work? Am I missing something?

[Opus4]

Originally Posted by heavylee

Could you explain in detail how to do what you are suggesting. It sounds like a good idea to me, but I don't know exactly which files to backup.

See this FAQ for more details.

Do you mean, after backing up the needed files, uninstall/reinstall Sage?

No, I mean just try reconfiguring first before trying a full reinstallation.

- Andy

[heavylee]

Originally Posted by Opus4

See this FAQ for more details.

- Andy

Thanks for your assistance Andy. I followed the Complete SageTV Reinstallation instructions and Sage is working again. All my favorites are there, the upcoming recording schedule, and most of the settings; but the only small problems is with the recorded shows. Before uninstalling, I moved all the raw MPG files to a different directory. After uninstalling, deleting the folder tree and reinstalling, I copies the MPGs back to the default video folder. Now, in the Recorded Shows menu, it only shows 3 shows, whereas I have MPGs for 94 shows (some where in folders because there were multiple episodes of the same show). I have tried to fully shut down Sage and restart it. I'm gonna try to restart the computer now as well.

When I uninstalled, I didn't clean out the registry manually. When I reinstalled, it didn't ask me for my serial number.

Any idea?

[Opus4]

Originally Posted by heavylee

...the only small problems is with the recorded shows. Before uninstalling, I moved all the raw MPG files to a different directory.

Why did you move the recordings out & back later on? SageTV probably couldn't see the shows before they were moved back & dumped them since they didn't exist any more.

Make sure the recording dir is configured in SageTV, then try shutting down SageTV, restore wiz.bin from before the reinstall that still had those shows listed, then restart SageTV.

- Andy

[heavylee]

Originally Posted by Opus4

Why did you move the recordings out & back later on? SageTV probably couldn't see the shows before they were moved back & dumped them since they didn't exist any more.

The recordings were stored within the Frey directory tree, and as per the instructions, I deleted the entire directory tree. So I moved them out first.

Originally Posted by Opus4

Make sure the recording dir is configured in SageTV, then try shutting down SageTV, restore wiz.bin from before the reinstall that still had those shows listed, then restart SageTV.

Restoring that bin worked. Thanks very much.

[Opus4]

Originally Posted by heavylee

The recordings were stored within the Frey directory tree, and as per the instructions, I deleted the entire directory tree. So I moved them out first.

Oh, I see... for future reference, since it is recommended that recording drives be partitioned using at least a 64K cluster size, it would probably be better to have the recordings stored on a partition that isn't also used for programs.

- Andy