New Hard Drive - Current Recordings Gone - HELP!!!

[robhix]

Hey all,

Yesterday I caught my Sage recording drive going out. Luckily I got to it before it really started going bad. I got all of the data copied off onto an external drive.

Now I have a new drive installed, same drive letter, same directory structure, everything set up exactly the same as it was before the crash. Here are my two problems:

1. The old recordings in the "current recording" directory are not showing up at all, even though they are in exactly the same place.
2. My favorites were wiped out.

Everything else looks like it is ok (e.g. program guide is still good, and stuff in the media center is still good).

Please help. I need to get the wife happy again.

Thanks again,
Rob Hix

[gplasky]

Find your wiz.bin file from the old installation directory and drop it into your new installation overwriting the one that is there. Do this before you make any new recordings.

Gerry

[robhix]

I will try it, but the installation directory was not touched in this drive death, so I am not sure what that will do for me!

[robhix]

Ok, as far as I can tell, this did not work. Replaces Wiz.bin, restarted service, hard drive churns like crazy writing to Wiz.bin. This went on for 30+ minutes. Now, no EPG data, still not current recordings, and no favorites.

What good is it for me to go to the trouble of backing up the Wiz.bin file when it will not work when replaced in the current directory. If it were not for my large $$$ investement in Sage, it would be out in the garbage now. I am tired of these nitpicky problems, and so is my wife.

PLEASE HELP!!!!

[evilpenguin]

How big is your backup wiz.bin?

[robhix]

3 MB

I have unistalled Sage and am trying a reinstall. Hopefully this will at least fix the churning hard drive problem.

[flavius]

Are you sure that all the hardware issues have been addressed?

[robhix]

As far as I can tell, yes. The hard drive I was using started having delayed write failures to $MFT. This is usually a sign the drive is going out. I copied the data over to a new drive.

Sorry about the garbage comment above, but I just spent $250.00 to get this back up and running, and it has not been easy. I am very upset.

Rob

[robhix]

Ok, here is the current situation.

1. Unintalled old version of Sage.
2. Installed Sage 6.5.9.204.
3. Started everything up and the hard drive ran continuously for 60 minutes. FileMon log says it was doing writes to Wiz.bin.
4. Shut down SageTV service and user interface and hard drive churning stopped.
5. Any time Sag is running, that hard drive is churning writing to Wiz.bin.

What's next:
1. I am going to defragment the drive with the Wiz.bin on it.
2. I am going to run analysis tools on the Wiz.bin drive to be sure it is good.

Any more ideas or suggestions? I am at the end of my thoughts on how to fix this.

Rob

[robhix]

Grasping at straws this morning, I unplugged my internet connection while the computer was churning away writing the wiz.bin file (according to FileMon). The churning stopped.

Then I stopped the SageTV service and restarted it. Still no churning.

PLEASE HELP!!!

[gplasky]

What was your previous version of Sage you had installed when the drive went bad?

Gerry

[robhix]

Gerry,

I am not sure any more. Last night's uninstall and reinstall took it out.

I am about ready to go back to my backup image where the only thing on the computer was security software and Sage. I made an image there in case I ever had problems.

The fact that this does not happen with the internet connection gone is a little odd to me.

I can deal with the old recordings not showing up in SageTV Recordings, and I can redo my favorites (I did not have that many). The real problem now is the churning disk updating the Wiz.bin.

Rob

[Opus4]

First, the best way to update SageTV is to install it on top of the old version, as mentioned in chapter 2 of the PDF manual and here: How to install a new version of SageTV. The biggest issue is to make sure you install to the same location where it was installed previously. This should help make sure that SageTV continues to use the existing database and settings.

Second, enable debug logging to see what the log says is going on.

- Andy

[GKusnick]

It might help if you could write down a step-by-step timeline of exactly what happened and what steps you took to try to fix it.

Also, what do you have in the way of backups of your SageTV installation folder? How recent is your most recent backup from before the crash? Did you make a fresh backup after the crash before starting to overwrite files and uninstall/reinstall software? Where did you get the backup Wiz.bin you used to overwrite your post-crash one (and do you still have a copy of the post-crash one somewhere)?

When troubleshooting things like this, the Hippocratic oath applies: first, do no harm. Always make sure you have a way to undo any troubleshooting step you take, just in case it makes things worse instead of better.

[robhix]

Greg and all,

Here is a timeline as I recall it. This should be fairly accurate:

Friday, April 17

My daily system backup completed successfully at 10:00 AM. As far as I can remember, everything recorded as expected, and the system was running normally.

Saturday, April 18

My fdaily system backup completed successfully at 10:00 AM. As far as I can remember, everything recorded as expected, and the system was running normally.

Sunday, April 19

Upon sitting down at the computer, I had several hundred errors stating various problems with the SageTV recording drive. Chief among the errors were delayed write failures to $MFT on the Sage recording drive. I restarted the computer and attempted a backup (which was being written to the Sage Recording drive). Got a large number of errors in return

I assumed the hard drive was going bad and backed up the recordings to an external drive to try to restore later.

I bought a new drive, transferred recordings to that new drive, reassigned the drive letter so that everything was the same as before. The only mistake I may have made here was not shutting down the Sage service when all of this started. I shut down the service, restored the wiz.bin file from the Saturday A.M. backup, an restarted the Sage service. At this point the hard drive began to churn endlessly. Thinink it just needed to "catch up", I left it. Two hours later it was still churning. Upon inspection with FILEMON, it appears that the wiz.bin file was what was being written. I then stopped the Sage Service and the churning stopped.

Monday, April 20

I uninstalled Sage program and reinstalled latest version. I did not restore the wiz.bin file, but instead went through the setup screens again. The hard drive was still churning writing the wiz.bin file.

As a debugging step I disconnected the internet connection, and the drive activity stopped.

I enabled debugging, but did not see any errors that caught my attention right off hand.

I checked my router setting on the off chance that something had changed to not allow the EPG to update. As far as I can tell, the port forwarding is working. Is there any software or web site that I can use to test this? If not, tell me what to look for and how to respond, and I wil gladyl write something to test it.

So, here is where I stand:
(1) With Sage running I get constant hard drive activity writing wiz.bin. So much activity in fact that it slows down the computer.
(2) With the internet connection disconnected, drive activity stops.
(3) Even when starting from scratch, I am getting no EPG data.
(4) When trying to start with my backed up wiz.bin file (from Saturday A.M.) I get no EPG data, and no favorites. Everything else appears to be ol.

To answer questions from GKusnick:
(1) Most recent GOOD backup of the SageTV folder was last Saturday morning.
(2) Most recent backup before the crash was Saturday A.M.
(3) No fresh backup made after the crash (yes, I know I violated the DO NO HARM rule here. I should know better than that, but my wife was not all that happy about the hard drive crash).
(4) Wiz.bin that I used post-crash came from Saturday A.M. backup. I have also tried other day last week with the same results. I do not have a post-crash copy of wiz.bin.

As I said before, I do not mind doing the setup again as it would not be all that much work. The thing that is puzzling me now is the churning hard drive writing the wiz.bin file all the time. Since I know that has gone on at least 2 hours before, I am afraid to leave it running unattended for fear that it will eventually cause the OS drive to fail.

I will let the thing run for an hour when I get home tonight and then post the log that I get from enabling error debugging. Maybe that will help someone figure this out.

Thanks again for all the help. Maybe we will figure this out before too long.

Rob Hix

[robhix]

Ok, started with a Fresh SageTV install tonight. I have completely opened up my router, so port forwarding cannot be the probkem. When I go to download the channel lineup, Sage hangs up. This is also when the computer goes crazy writing wiz.bin.

It looks like Sage is having trouble downloading the channel data, however, I cannot tell where this is going wrong. I have shut down all of my security software (ZoneAlarm and Avast) and it still does not work. Guess I just blew a lot of money on something that is not going to work.

Any help would be appreciated. Especially on the network problems. I cannot figure out why something that was working so well could all of a sudden just quit. Especially when no configuration was done.

Please help or Sage is going in the garbage.

Rob

[GKusnick]

Assuming your Saturday morning backup was a complete backup of your entire SageTV installation folder, here's what I'd be doing in your shoes:

1. Figure out exactly which version of SageTV you were running Saturday morning. You can get this information from the version property in Sage.properties.

2. Find the installer for that version. If you don't have a copy saved away somewhere, you can download it from http://download.sage.tv/SageTV_VX_Y_ZSetup.exe (replacing X_Y_Z with the actual version number).

3. Uninstall whatever version you have now and delete that directory (backing it up first of course).

4. Run the installer you downloaded in step 2, taking care to install into the same directory name you were running from on Saturday.

5. When the installer finishes, do not start Sage, but instead restore the SageTV directory from your Saturday backup, overwriting the new installation.

6. Enable debug logging in the restored Sage.properties.

7. Configure the SageTV Service (if you use it) and start Sage.

8. If you still get the Wiz.bin disk thrashing behavior, submit a request for technical support.

[gplasky]

Don't know what type tuners you have but with the HDHR tuner Silicondust said that you actually need to uninstall (remove) Zone Alarm because of issues with that program. I don't know if that could be part of the problem but I would suggest uninstalling it and just run the Windows firewall. (Or no firewall until you finish with the Sage installation.)

Gerry

[robhix]

Greg,

I will try that tonight or tomorrow night. If anything should work, that would.

Gerry,

I am using the PVR-150 capture card. As far as I know, there are no issues with Zone Alarm. This thing was up and running great before the hard drive failure. I really do not think Zone Alarm is the problem.

Hopefully this will work.

Rob

[robhix]

Greg and all,

I went through and did what you suggested tonight. When I started the SageTV service back up, it eventually started thrashing the hard drive writing to wiz.bin. This time I have captured everything using ProcMon and I will save it in case I need to look back at anything.

After about 40 minutes, it is still writing to the wiz.bin file. Several times it seems to have stopped for a few seconds, only to start up again.

I have started the UI back up and all of the old programs are there along with my favorites, and the EPG data, just like you would expect. I have not had this luck before.

Something weird that I have noticed by looking at ProcMon is that it appears that Sage has done an "Refresh Imported Media" several times as I have seen the files being accessed in ProcMon. This is a little confusing to me.

That is what I know for now. I am going to let this run for a little while and see if it just needs to get itself caught up.

Thanks again,
Rob