Symptoms of a sick and dying wiz.bin

[roadtoad]

Admission of guilt: yes I should have done a backup sometime since Sept 2006

Has your sage pegged the cpu on startup? For 10 minutes? 30 minutes? An hour? 24 hours? Has your sage not displayed entries in the scheduled recordings view? Has there been a delay of manual entries appearing in the scheduled recordings view? Is there a long delay of an entry being removed from scheduled recordings if you cancel the recording? Are favorites not appearing in your scheduled recordings? Has your sage not recorded something, either a favorite or a manual? Are your favorites still intact? Will sage start recording the manual entry if you start watching it during the recording time? Does that same entry show up in scheduled recordings once you start watching it? Does your sage only record for a short time, quit and what was recorded disappear? Can you still see your sage recordings and watch them normally?

These are the highlights of my situation. Sage is trying to tell me that my wiz.bin is sick and dying. Problem is, I did not recognize the early symptoms in time and my wiz.bak also contracted the same infection.

So I was living with all the symptoms above, up until sage stopped recording as scheduled. I have 850GB of recordings yet to be watched and I knew a doOver would have all those end up in the imported videos. So I spent the past two days scouring the forums since I've not dealt with a sage problem since Sept 2006. Not surprisingly I was disappointed to find no improvements in the wiz.bin saga.


I was determined to fix this situation with minimal impact and hopefully not loose my recording and viewing history. That meant there was no way I was going to simply use the wiz.bin and wiz.bak from the Sept 2006 installation (see I do save some things). So I decided to do some testing.

Disclaimer: Don't try this at home. My situation may not match your circumstances. This is provided as information that others may find useful.

Achknowledgement: yes I did the zip/copy of the directory and make backups of the wiz and settings files. So when I delete something, assume there is a copy or back up.

I decided to test my configuration (see signature for details) and prove the hardware/settings side of the house was good. Why wouldn't it be since nothing has changed since Sept 2006. I was convinced that the wiz.bin was the culprit though not corrupt since I could still view and watch my recordings. So I deleted wiz.bin/bak and restarted sage using the sage service console. After the stop button became active I fired up the sage client. No surprisingly there were no recordings or favorites or data in the program guide. After a few minutes the program guide began to populate. I also checked the imported videos and there was all my stuff.

YAD: I just redid this test to make sure that I was remembering my actions correctly. I was surprised to see entries in the imported videos that were fragments from my intermittent recording attempts with my diseased wiz.bin. However, non of those entries appear in the recordings or imported videos for that wiz.bin. So interestingly another symptom is new files are not imported.

So to continue my proof of a good configuration, I started some manual recordings on all 5 tuners and they showed up in the scheduled recordings display immediately. If I canceled one, it disappeared immediately. Next is manually set some recordings in the futures (next half hour) to see if they would start and finish without problems. Everything worked fine so I could relax a little knowing I would not miss the Cowboys game.

Observation: Starting sage like this, the wiz.bin starts out very small and grows as it loads the schedule and imports stuff. I wonder how much of the size is attributed to the schedule vs. import data. An interesting test for someone would be to get your sage all set up and working and after you have no recordings and no imported media start your system without a wiz.bin/bak. That would tell you how much of your file size is due to program information. Just curious.

Warning: Be careful when you are renaming/copying files because a small mistake in windows explorer could be catastrophe. I just slipped and now the sage process will not start. Also, don't be doing any of this file manipulation unless you have stopped your sage service.

Back now, using a backup copy of the last working diseased version before doing this testing.

So why did I go to the trouble to make this post? First to capture what I did and refer to it when I submit a support request. Who know, someone out there might be in a similar situation with the right circumstances and can get their sage back up and running without starting over. I hate the answer: get a copy of the "fresh" wiz.bin and properties files. That answer is just as bad as "you will have to reinstall windows".

So I was able to prove an easy alternative to get going again. Rename your broken wiz.bin/bak files and start the sage service. You will not have any favorites or recording history, but you can prove that your configuration is working. As the schedule is loaded and your imports occur, your new wiz.bin will build. Now if only there were a way to get the history out of my broken wiz.bin and import it into the new running system.

YAW: If you do this, don't change anything that may affect your settings files (unless you were smart and made copies).

[GKusnick]

Originally Posted by roadtoad

Now if only there were a way to get the history out of my broken wiz.bin and import it into the new running system.

There is. The web server plugin allows you to export and import program metadata in XML form. There's also an XML file generator plugin that can automatically refresh the exported XML as your watched history changes. This is easy to set up and provides a continuous backup of your history outside of wiz.bin.