Service startup hangs on system startup

[Sparhawk6]

For some reason, every time I reboot my system, the SageTV service hangs when trying to load up.

The problem started after I lost power to my computer. After I lost power, I opened up the system to make sure everything was OK, and in the process I inadvertently pulled a SATA cord to my media drive. When I restored power and loaded up the system, I noticed that the drive was missing, so I shutdown the system and plugged the SATA drive back in.

Now every time I load the system, the SageTV service hangs. I have to reboot into safe mode, disable the service, and reboot back into Windows and load the service manually. This is not a solution because I want my server to be able to automatically load the SageTV service every time the system starts up.

Is my database corrupt or something because I loaded Sage without the media drive plugged in?

EDIT: When I enable debug logging, I see that every time it tries to loadup, it gets stuck on the following line:

Thu 3/25 22:47:40.902 [main@13d93f4] Wizard allocating table for MediaFile of size 13914
Thu 3/25 22:47:40.903 [main@13d93f4] Wizard loading main index for MediaFile

[SWKerr]

I actually had it where I couldn't even kill it in task manager. I had to rename the directory and reboot so it would not load.

I would make a copy of the whole directly. Then delete the wiz.bin and rename the wiz.bak in its place.

If that doesn't work I would go to a reinstall in place.

[CarlR]

This seems like a variation of my situation, and the situation I have seen reported in several other posts. I haven't seen a definitive reason why it is happening, but the common solution seems to be to delay the startup of the SageTV service.

You'll need to disable the service in the SageTV service control dialog, and then write a script with the line "sc start SageTV" (I think) to start the service "manually". This script can be scheduled (via windows scheduler) to start a set period of time after system startup, or user login (if you have auto-login enabled).

This solution works for me. I would have liked to figure out exactly what the problem was, but this works and that's all that really matters to me.

[Sparhawk6]

Can you copy and paste the text of your script here? I used to know that stuff but it's been a long time. Is it batch file?

[wbarber69]

I have been using sagetv for at least 5 years now and have a very old wiz.bin file that is currently still active. I have had this problem with the last 3 sagetv systems I have built all I know is that trying to do anything to make it load faster will will make it load slower (watched pot). It seems that you may have a corrupt wiz file. I say leave it be for an hour or so and see if it ever starts up, every time I restart I hate myself for it because I know it will never come back on, but it does eventually. I think my problems actually started with my fist system. A bad pvr-250 that kept spiking my system and causing it to abruptly shutdown and restart itself 5 times a day. I have been begging all the powers that be to one day release a wiz.bin cleaner of some sort, but I don't even know if it would be possible. The worst part is, if you start over completely, the problem goes away, but you have to start training your server all over again. Like I said over 5 years of programming data, I would lose instantly. Watched shows, IR suggestions, plus you lose info on all the programs you have stored at the moment and they all become imported videos, and for me thats currently 1245GB of shows I havent watched yet or have archived, and I'm not ready to give that up, I've got thousands of dollars invested in this thing, i wish I could just turn it on and have it come right on. But that will never happen, because I'[m not giving up my wiz file

[Sparhawk6]

That sounds horrible. I don't want to lose my database.

[ptoal]

I just ran smack on into this issue myself, tonight. Similar to others, I have a 5+ year old wiz.bin that I'm not willing to part with.

For a reason I can not explain, my Sage (WinXP) spontaneously powered itself off today, and when it came back online, it didn't come back to life properly. The SageTV service was hung hard, I couldn't kill it, and it actually broke the network connectivity to the box (not responsive to pings, yet I could send pings out?!)

After searching these forums, I found others with a similar situation, and followed the "wave dead chicken over your head" approach, which is to reboot in safe mode, disable the sage service, reboot, and start it manually. I can't fathom why this would fail so oddly. (Though the complete lack of introspection in WinXP reminded me of one of the reasons why all my other machines are now Mac's).

I don't know if a recent Java update was to blame, or what. The system is running at the moment, and I'm just hoping that it doesn't shut down at any point in the near future, because I don't want to find out if it will do this again on next bootup. (I've re-enabled the service).

I am seriously toying with the idea of blowing away my wiz.bin, but the thought of having the system re-record all the reruns of shows we watch isn't really appealing.

-Pat