Changing Recording Drives: A SageTV Success Story

[MeInMaui]

Hi,

I just thought I'd share the results of a hard drive upgrade where everything went right.
But the real interesting part is I never had to stop or restart SageTV at all during the process.

I am running a SageTV server in the garage and a full client in the living room. I am using the latest version of the SageTV software and all of my directories use UNC paths.

I have been wanting to add additional storage to my SageTV server for a while now. Yesterday I stopped by Costco and picked up a 750GB Seagate Freeagent Pro external hard drive for a great price ($276.99 - $30 coupon). Late last night after everyone was in bed, I set up the hard drive, connected it to my SageTV server via USB2.0 and reformatted it with 64k blocks.

I had four 320GB drives dedicated to recording in the server and decided to retask one of them for DVD storage. So I copied all of the files (~225GB) from one of the drives to the new drive. The flakey windows timer said it would take about 2 hrs as best I could tell, so I went to bed.

This morning I went to check on the situation. I compared the old and new locations and everything looked like it copied correctly. Now at this point our 3.5yr old was watching Go Diego Go! from the video library on the SageTV Client in the living room and SageTV was actively recording a program to another drive.

I'm not sure if it was bravery or foolhardiness (probably the latter mixed with a little impatience), but I decided to perform the swap on the server while all of that was going on. Incidentally I was also carying one of our twins, so I had to do all of this one-handed. Here is how it worked.

I first made a backup copy of the wiz.bin file (I might be crazy, but I'm not stupid....at least not too stupid) and then proceeded to disable sharing for the old drive ( it was \\htpc\Recordings4\ ). Then I enabled sharing on the new drive and gave it the same share name as the old one ( \\htpc\Recordings4\ ). Thats it!

I went out to the living room and waited for the last 2 minutes of Go Diego Go! to finish and then checked to see how badly I had screwed things up. To my surprise and amazement all of my recordings were still there and the diskbar showed the new 750GB of glorious new storage! Everything worked perfectly and not only did I not have to exit the sage server or client at all during the process, but it worked even while simultaneously watching a program and recording another.

All I can say is SageTV is Awesome!!!

Thanks to the SageTV devs for making such a great product!

Aloha,
Mike

[SprDtyF350]

Just did pretty much the same thing the other day when I upgraded my Sage server machine to more of a Tim Taylor "More Power" machine. I kept the wiz.bin file, and made sure the new drives were mapped the same way with the same names. Copied all the shows, copied back the wiz.bin, and life was good again...

Randy

[wjohn]

Congratulations on your success story.

I noticed you are using the Client in the living room. I assume you are watching it on a TV? How is this done? And, do you do all your programming, etc., from the client?

Thanks,

[MeInMaui]

Wolfgang,

My TV is a 47" LCD panel with DVI and HDMI inputs. I just have the DVI out from my video card connected to one of the TV's DVI inputs, running at 1920x1080. My sound is output to my receiver via SPDIF. The SageTV client is used exclusively for all user interaction with SageTV. My server is headless (no monitor) and located in my garage. If I need to do any maintenance on the server outside of SageTV, I just connect to it via VNC.

Note that if you have a standard definition TV, you would need to have a video card installed in your client with an s-video output built-in. However, I feel that for standard definition the better solution is to get a media externder (Media MVP + SageTV extender license) for ~$110. It provides the full SageTV interface (you can do all programming, etc. from the extender), the picture quality is excellent, and it is silent. We have one connected to our bedroom TV.

Aloha,
Mike

[stevech]

Originally Posted by MeInMaui

Wolfgang,

My TV is a 47" LCD panel with DVI and HDMI inputs. I just have the DVI out from my video card connected to one of the TV's DVI inputs, running at 1920x1080. My sound is output to my receiver via SPDIF. The SageTV client is used exclusively for all user interaction with SageTV. My server is headless (no monitor) and located in my garage. If I need to do any maintenance on the server outside of SageTV, I just connect to it via VNC.

client to PC is 100BT ethernet or WiFi or ?

[MeInMaui]

Originally Posted by stevech

client to PC is 100BT ethernet or WiFi or ?

I am running gigabit ethernet through an 8-port netgear switch. All of the built-in ports on my pc's support GigE and the switch was pretty cheap, so it was a no-brainer. I also have an HDHomeRun recording some HD programs and there is no way a wireless connection could handle streaming HD. I just picked up a wireless bridge, so I will try to use that to go wireless with my MVP one of these days.

Aloha,
Mike

[stevech]

thanks. Me too. I found a 4 port GbE switch (D-Link) for $30. Works fine - two of my PCs have GbE.
I will try a wired MVP connected to an 11g WiFi bridge in a few days. Too hard to get a wire where the MVP goes.