My Sage install has become completely hosed... help please:)

[BrettS]

I just started having some very weird problems with my SageTV server. I was watching a show and I got a circle of death. I tried to stop the show and I tried to go back to the main menu, but nothing seemed to help. I finally hit Ctrl-Alt-Delete and then shut down and restarted Windows.

Sage seemed to come back, however, it is quite broken now. I've tried using both the server and a client and I get the same results from either. Trying to go into SageTV Recordings results in a circle of death. Trying to go to Live TV results in a black screen with no program information. The program guide does show valid data, however, if I try to tune to any channel I get the message "No encoders can tune the selected station". I did check setup and all of my tuners are still listed and configured, and if I go into the channel lineup configuration I can actually preview the channels (although it takes a very long time before the preview comes up).

All of my favorites are still listed, but if I go to schedule recordings and then view recording schedule the recording schedule is completely blank.

Any ideas on what to check here?

Thanks much,
Brett

[BrettS]

Well... the problem seems to have fixed itself... but I'm still not sure what happened. After trying to restart once or twice more, I hit SageTV Recordings and it went back to the circle of death. I let it sit there for quite a while (more than 40 minutes) because I could see the hard drive activity light was on solid... clearly it was doing something.

Finally, the circle of death disappeared and Sage was just sitting at the main menu. I went to view the recording schedule and live TV first and they both worked. Then I tried going to SageTV recordings and everything seemed fine. I tried starting a couple of recorded shows and it seems like it's back to normal.

Any ideas on what might have happened or what it was doing for 40+ minutes while it was showing the circle of death?

Thanks again,
Brett

[stevech]

Did you use the Microsoft First Aid Kit: Reboot Windows.

and

You DO, of course, backup wiz.bin every day, preferrably automatically using something like SecondCopy?

[davephan]

You might think about getting some disk imaging software setup to automatically image your boot drive. If something bad happens like a blue screen of death or some other computer failure, then you will be prepared to go back to a point in time before the problem occurred. The problems will be fixed in less than 30 minutes, unless they are hardware problems, or problems with your recording drives.

My system automatically images every night with both Ghost and Acronis. There are monthly full images. Acronis has weekly differential images and daily incremental images. Ghost has differential daily images.

I can then recover to any day in the past in less than 30 minutes just by booting to a CD and picking the recovery date.

If you don't prepare for recovery in advance of problem, then you may end up with a painful and time consuming scratch rebuild when the system fails.

Dave