Help please, clarify moving Sage recordings to new PC

[stevech]

1. Important: Make a note of any drive letters used for Video Directory locations on the original computer.
2. Note for UNC Video Directory paths: If you are getting rid of the old system completely, such that it will no longer be on the network, you must first change the video directories back to using a local drive letter style of naming. If SageTV does not have access to the file's original location, SageTV will not recognize the file in a new location. See the above questions of this post and return to using "drive:\path" style naming.
3. Install and configure SageTV on the new computer.
4. Create the new locations to store recordings and add those Video Recording Directories to SageTV.
5. Exit SageTV completely on the new computer. (I don't mean just put it to sleep - exit the UI and stop the service, if using service mode.)
6. Copy all your existing recordings to the desired Video Recording Directory locations on the new computer.
7. If the new computer has a different name, you should edit the properties file and set: "make_all_mediafiles_local=true". (w/o the quotes) Your recordings won't be seen correctly if you do not make this property change. (May not be needed for v5 and later.)
8. Copy wiz.bin from the old computer, replacing the one on the new computer. (Found in the SageTV directory.)
9. Important: Check the list of drive letters from the old computer. (The list you made in step 1.) Make sure those drive letters are available on the new computer. Note that those drives don't need any video recording directories; they simply need to exist. If they do not exist, just map a drive letter to some other drive. If it is a CD drive, put some data CD in the drive so that the letter will refer to an actual disk. When SageTV restarts, if it cannot access the drive or UNC path where a file was originally located, it will not recognize the file in its new location.
10. Restart SageTV on the new computer.
11. Once you have confirmed that SageTV is working properly on the new computer, uninstall SageTV from the old computer. Do not delete your old configuration files until you have confirmed the new installation with all the old recordings is working correctly.

I'm about to do a cut-over from old PC to new PC, before the Sage Trial license expires on the new PC. I will move the license from old to new. I have moved 300GB of recordings to the new PC.
I need help with:
a) Is instruction #7, above, necessary for Sage V6?
b) Instruction #9 is unclear: My new PC will have the recordings all in one folder on V:. The old PC had them in three different drives and folders. The new PC has C: (boot) D: has no video files and V: has one recordings directory for the new Sage. Instruction #9 seems to say that I need D:, E: and F: on the new PC because they existed on the old PC. Not sure how I can do this. D: can be the irrelevant drive on the new PC. What E and F must be, I don't get. Map E to a CD with what formatted media? Data CD? F - I have to have that? Map it to some network drive?

And I have to find the procedure for moving the license once new PC is working fully.

[ke6guj]

you could create a couple empty folders on one of your drives. Then share out that folder. Then map a drive letter, E: and F: to that empty share.

So if you made "new folder" and new folder 2" as your empty folders, share them out as "new folder and "new folder 2". Then map \\newPCname\new folder to E: and \\newPCname\new folder 2 to F:

Or use a couple of USB drives with the drive letters set to E: and F: in disk management, if neccessary.

As for moving the license, if Windows, you should just be able to enter the license on the new PC when Sage starts. There is no requirement to unregister the license on the old PC to transfer it. Don't start Sage on the old PC with the same license and you should be fine.

edit: What they meant regarding using a data CD, for example, if your CD drive was D:, Sage needs to be able to see that there aren't any Sage recordings on D: in order to attempt to find them somewhere else, your V: folder. If the CD drive is empty, when Sage attempts to read it to see if there are any recordings, it will error out. SO, just put in any CD that has some data, so that when Sage accesses it, it can scan it and see that there aren't any recordings on it.

[stevech]

Thanks. Once new Sage runs with the V: set of files, I assume I can now undo the old drive letters?

Anyone know about this one:
a) Is instruction #7, above, necessary for Sage V6?

[ke6guj]

Originally Posted by stevech

Thanks. Once new Sage runs with the V: set of files, I assume I can now undo the old drive letters?

Yup, once Sage has "re-indexed" the video files and sees them on V:, then you can remove the temporary drive letters.

Anyone know about this one:
a) Is instruction #7, above, necessary for Sage V6?

Don't know about that one. Just have multple wiz.bin backup before you attempt the move. Try starting Sage without doing the "make_all_mediafiles_local=true" and if it doesn't look right, then try it with it if neccessary. As long as you have another wiz.bin backup copy, you can try again from scratch, if neccessary. I haven't had to do a new PC move in a while so I haven't tried in in V5 or V6.

[stevech]

Thanks. I successfully moved all the folders to one folder on the new PC.
I then did a demo of Sage (6) on the new PC using the MVP instead of the old Sage (5) feeding from the PC's S-video port. Flunked the WAF. Back to old sage until I can overcome the, er, WAF negatives (strongly worded).
But that's another topic.