So close...

[hingepin]

Go figure. I had everyting up and running great and stated to collect stuff for the transition to WHS. Had the plain vanilla SageMC running, music and DVD rips were almost complete, and went from wireless on the HD200 to MOCA (live in a townhouse community). I even stopped tinkering with it after it was all set up. The WAF was high...then...BAM! The PATA HDD died in the existing rig! Go figure!

"Why can't we have normal cable like everyone else???!!!"

"Because you are married to me!"

At least I get to expedite my laundry list of parts for the server! The only downside is I might have to go to a big box store and pay full price for an HVR-2250 to tide her over til the HDHR arrives.

Now just have to convince her that I'll break even selling my old gear on e-bay.

[davephan]

This is the reason to take periodic images of your SageTV computer. If you had taken images during the build process, and after the build process, then you could recover to the new replacement hard drive in about 30 minutes.

Image recoveries will work if you use Windows XP and Vista. However, if you use WHS, then imaging might or might not work. You would need to test it. There is a free imaging program that might work with WHS where the image is taken and recovered with the operating system not running, called Partition Image is Not Ghost. I think that might be required because of the 'tombstones' with WHS. One of the problems with WHS is the inability to back up itself!

If you do periodically image the computer, the best way is to take an image of the system, then restore it to a different, but identical test computer. If you don't have an identical test computer, then you could restore it to the same computer. If the image recovery fails, then you would have to go to the last successfully recovered image. When you take images, and test the images, then you will have confidence that the system can be recovered with the image.

You can even take differential images between the full images. So, it is possible to take images very frequently and recover to very recent points in time.

If your wife becomes dependent on SageTV, without alternatives like the feature limited cable or satellite PVRs, then you need to have a plan of how you will be able to quickly recover the SageTV computer, if it fails. This will improve your WAF.


Dave