Any ideas why my server crashed?

[dgeezer]

Last night we sat down to watch a little tv. I started the client and it took probably 2 minutes to connect to the server. When I tried to play a show it just froze. After a few minutes my wife went to another TV to watch live TV.

Here is my basic setup:

Older server pc running XP. It is an athlon64 with 512mb ram. It runs headless and contains 4 various sized hard drives and 2 tuners HVR-1600 and HVR-1800. Both of these tuners are set up to only tune analogue cable. I also have an HDHomerun which uses both tuners to tune QAM cable.

Playback is handled by 1-hd100 1-HD200 and a client pc (zotac nvidia ion).

Here's what I found:
I logged in to the server (TightVNC) and started the task manager. The SageTVService was jumping from about 45% to 99% cpu usage and showing 245,500 ram usage. I was recording 2 shows on the HDHomerun at the time, but there was no playback happening. I did try to start the client again but it wouldn't even make connection to the server (spinny circle). I tried a net stop of the service and a net start and as soon as the SageTV service came back up it pegged the cpu again. I finally had to re-boot the server, which seemed to fix the problem. This morning I started the client and everything seems fine. I can watch recordings etc. The recording of American Idol that was running during all of this is garbled. I'm heartborken..

Anyway, any ideas on what to do now. Would more ram help or just mask some other problem for a while?

[carlgar]

I suggest you start with the disk check program on your hard disks. Be sure to Scan for and attempt recovery of bad sectors. I just went through about 5 or 6 crashes over about a week that was corrected by finding and fixing bad sectors on both of my sage recording disks. I was seeing 3 different types of crashes and also higher than normal CPU usage. The first sign of a problem was a crash caused by a thermal event. then I saw crashes caused by a illegal instruction and then I started getting random crashes with no reason given. I have now run 8 days with no problems after fixing the disks.

[dgeezer]

Well, I just ran the windows chkdsk program on my C: drive. It's a 20GB partition just for the operating system. Now I am watching, and pausing a live show in HD and cpu usage hasn't peaked and memory usage is down to about 105,000. Of course it could just be because I rebooted a couple times....