NOOO! Server death 3 hours before Lost Premiere!

[IVB]

AIEEE! My WHS server just kinda sorta died, and it's now 2.5 hours before the Lost Season Premiere!!!!

It boots up fine, but is totally non-responsive to half the stuff, and doesn't acknowledge the network, 99% of programs can't be run via the start menu. I tried putzing with it for an hour to no avail.

I happened to have a spare 500GB HD, so I backed up everything from c:\cqc and c:\sage to the RAID1, and am now re-installing WHS from scratch.

And here I sit, staring at "Setup will finish in 51 minutes." Or, 7:54pm, which gives me 1:06 to install the various device drivers, then re-install SageTV and setup a video source for the OTA tuner.

Which in theory, should be plenty of time, but every time I do this it takes damn hours to get through all the BS.

Holy crap will my wife kill me if this isn't restored by 9pm...

[SprDtyF350]

I feel your pain.. But you do remember there is such a thing as watching the show "When" it comes on? Like in the old days....

You turn on the TV, tune it to the right channel... And like magic! Your show will be there. Just try not to break your remote trying to fast forward through the commercials.

And yes.. Just for fun I am being a smart you know what

[IVB]

that would be true if it weren't lost, and that too the season premiere. The wife has been looking forward to this...

[Skirge01]

I think what he was trying to point out is that, assuming you can connect your STB directly to your TV, you could've watched Lost live, without recording it. I know I've been guilty of forgetting that's possible sometimes, too!

[IVB]

unfortunately, that's not possible due to wiring. I only wired cat5 to the TV location, and the DirecTV/antenna only runs to the server room.

I finally got it all installed at 9:00, but the damn network port wouldn't work. I finally randomly tried the other network port at 9:15, and et voila, that worked.

But then, I couldn't get the damn VBox or HDHomerun tuners to work.

At 9:55, I got the DirecTV tuner working, but neither the Vbox or the HDHomerun want to work. Odd, as those are usually the easy ones.

Sigh.

[SprDtyF350]

Originally Posted by Skirge01

I think what he was trying to point out is that, assuming you can connect your STB directly to your TV, you could've watched Lost live, without recording it. I know I've been guilty of forgetting that's possible sometimes, too!

Yep... What he said

[GKusnick]

Cue davephan and his pitch for disk imaging.

[wrems]

Originally Posted by GKusnick

Cue davephan and his pitch for disk imaging.

lmao I was just thinking the same thing!

[wrems]

I feel for you. It would be curtains for me and my addiction to Sage if this had happened to me tonight!

[mickp]

Originally Posted by GKusnick

Cue davephan and his pitch for disk imaging.

LOL

[davephan]

You're out of luck. There's no fast recovery plan for WHS. Maybe you could record the show with a VCR instead!

Dave

[Opus4]

Originally Posted by GKusnick

Cue davephan and his pitch for disk imaging.

Originally Posted by davephan

You're out of luck. There's no fast recovery plan for WHS. Maybe you could record the show with a VCR instead!

You know, I still have a VCR, but it isn't hooked up to the cable.

It looks like last night's episode called itself "LA X (Parts 1 & 2)", airing after a 1 hour recap. The guide says "LA X (part 2)" is airing again next week. I haven't watched it yet, so I don't know if part 1 is still a recap portion.


I haven't followed WHS that closely, but you can't even image it from a boot CD?

I'm not using WHS, but now I'll have to give my imaging story. I regularly image my non-recording drives and have been taking incremental images as I reinstall apps on a new PC. Last night, one app wouldn't take its license (probably related to antivirus or some such thing) and Windows booted to a black screen w/a mouse cursor, even in safe mode. Rather than fight with it any more, I simply restored to the image from just before trying that install. I suppose I just did my hard drive disaster recovery test on the new system.

- Andy

[Taddeusz]

This is the reason you need a good backup plan "just in case". Sure, you may hopefully never need to use it but it's always a good idea.

Just like at a modern restaurant where everything is done by computer. If the computer goes down you shouldn't be forced to close. Pull out a good old calculator and a pad of receipts. May be slow but works just the same.

[vhurst]

Whenever I have this sort of problem, like the power outage that hit me in the middle of the 24 season premere two weeks ago , it's Hulu time...

[Skirge01]

Originally Posted by Opus4

I haven't followed WHS that closely, but you can't even image it from a boot CD?

That's correct. It's a well known complaint among WHS users, which MS has supposedly fixed in WHS2 (Vail). However MS designed WHS to utilize the OS drive, it negates any attempt at imaging due to the constantly changing nature of it's data. At least, that's my attempt to explain why it doesn't work without knowing the gory details of what's going on behind the scenes. WHS can reinstall itself and recover all your data in the drive pool, but it goes back to a stock install where you need to set up users, permissions, and add-ins, among any other programs you may have installed (i.e. SageTV, etc).

I'm not using WHS, but now I'll have to give my imaging story. I regularly image my non-recording drives and have been taking incremental images as I reinstall apps on a new PC. Last night, one app wouldn't take its license (probably related to antivirus or some such thing) and Windows booted to a black screen w/a mouse cursor, even in safe mode. Rather than fight with it any more, I simply restored to the image from just before trying that install. I suppose I just did my hard drive disaster recovery test on the new system.

Yep... couldn't agree more. This is what WHS does so very well, too. Any PC (up to 10) on your network can be imaged automatically. You can then restore to any point using the boot disc. You can even include any necessary drivers (incl. via USB drive) during the imaging.

[IVB]

Actually in the light of day, the entire episode (not yet done though) wasn't that bad.

<begin best Jack Bauer Imitation>
The following happened between 5:30pm and 11:00pm. Events happen in real time.

5:30pm - I realize the server is acting funny, and go downstairs to check it out.
6:15pm - I realize there is no hope, and I need to use a spare HD to reformat.
6:45pm - I finally find my WHS CD, I didn't put it in with all the others
7:35pm - WHS install onto a new HD is done (including all that extra crap at the end)
7:55pm - nearly all device drivers installed, except for motherboard's LAN driver. I can't find the CD, so I go to download off the internet on a different machine. HOLY CRAP - SuperMicro's Intel LAN adapter is a 170MB download, and is estimating 58 mins to finish!
8:30pm - I finish installing almso all the other software while waiting on the download. (CQC, SqueezeCenter, Lantronix Serial-IP software, iTunes). I hold off on PlayOn just-in-case.
8:55pm - LAN driver downloaded. Install begins.
8:59pm - LAN driver installed, computer rebooted,
9:00pm - ethernet port won't receive any IP packets. Swearing begins.
9:15pm - No internet love, I do a hail-mary and try the other LAN port. WTF, that works?!?
9:45pm - I can't get either the VBoxx or HDHomeRun to work via Sage; they're recognized, but both claim 'no signal'. Very odd, especially since the HDHR Config claims to have found channels.
9:55pm - Hail mary of copying over my DirecTV H21-200 ir file and setting up via the USBUIRT work! Recording of Lost begins, I manage to catch the last hour.

so..given that there was only 3 elapsed hours for 90% of the rebuild (OTA tuners remaining) with perhaps 2.5 hours of actual work, and that I re-formatted and setup an entire HA server in that time, it isn't too bad.

I still don't understand why both of my digital tuners don't work, that is very curious. Fortunately I was able to take today off work to finish this up, i have a 10pm mens soccer game against the #1 team in the league, so I can't deal with this tonight.

[bialio]

It seems to me that ABC will be showing the 'enhanced' version next week, so you probably didn't lose your change to view the whole thing in HD - although you'll end up with little pop-up boxes spouting trivia at you for the entire show!

You gotta love Lost though - time travel isn't enough. Gotta throw in an alternate timeline to really mess with peoples heads......

[IVB]

Well, I just tried removing & re-adding the HDHR (after rebooting the box). There was also an HDHR update that I downloaded.

Whaddya know, it suddenly works.

The Vbox doesn't work, but now that I'm back to 1 DirecTV-HD tuner and 2 HD-OTA tuners, I may opt to just say 'screw it', at least for the next several days/weeks/months.

[bthurber]

As cool as Sage and the like are, it seems really silly that hundreds of Sage users (me included) recorded essentially the same "Lost" gigabits to their hard drives last night. And then many megaflops of processing cycles were used to comskip those bits when these processes only needed to be done once and then "shared". Certainly current bandwidth and probably legal issues would hamper a technical solution to this, but it seems we're missing something obvious here.

[IVB]

well, the same thing applies to the reason I have 4TB of storage to hold 200+ DVDs & BluRay's, or the 600+ CDs.

The only real something missing is DRM, otherwise i'm sure there'd be an incentive for someone to come out and facilitate just that.