Mobo Died. What's the best way to keep sage happy thru an upgrade?

[ericscottf]

My biostar mobo croaked badly last night. It isn't coming back.

I'm going to go pick out a new mobo, and the odds are only 50/50 that I'll wind up with the same one. If i get a new one, I'll have to reinstall my OS/software/etc (ugh...) I'm fairly annoyed with the way this one died, and its customer reviews on newegg are 33% poor, but it has everything I need in a board (except for working...)

What's the best process for getting sage back with all my shows and status and settings?
Once I've got the drivers for my HD-PVRs set up and all, i'm thinking:
Fresh-Install sage
Reboot a few times for good measure
take my old sage folder and dump it right over the installed one

Will this work? If not, what should I do?
I've got all my shows on a separate drive, sage is/was on the OS drive, which I'll mirror to another drive before installing the OS, then cherry-pick the things i want to copy back over.

thanks

[Clift]

That should work. Assuming all your drivers, codecs, etc are installed properly. Oh and if you can make sure the drive letters stay the same, that would help out a lot too. Honestly there's not much more to it that I can think of.

[ericscottf]

Yeah, obviously I'll have to keep drive letters the same or sage won't find anything.

The biggest PITA is going to be remembering/installing the myriad services/tweaks that i'm going to forget until something goes wrong... SSH daemon, STBkeepalive... ug, i should have made a list...


heh, I wonder what happens if i just leave the OS drive in and install XP over the current install. I remember that used to work (very very poorly) in win98....

[davephan]

If you had an image with Acronis and Universal Recovery, then you could recover the image onto a different system board. If you didn't have Universal Recovery, then you may be able to apply the image onto a similar system board with the same chipset, if you can't get a duplicate system board. The trouble with system boards is they keep changing. You almost have to buy two system boards, so you have a spare identical system board. I built a second computer with an identical system board. If my SageTV system board fails, I will use that system board as a spare. I also have Acronis with Universal Recovery, which is a second option.

If you haven't been imaging, then you are stuck with a hassle manually rebuilding the system. Maybe next time, you will have an image.

Dave

[Opus4]

There's a sticky with a whole series of FAQs for this type of question at the top of this forum.

And, no, you don't really want to just copy the entire old SageTV directory to a new computer unless everything really is exactly the same.

- Andy

[ericscottf]

Actually, I do have it backed up to a separate drive with acronis.

How will having acronis as a backup help me restore to a different mobo with different features, drivers, presumably even a different north/southbridge?
I distinctly remember that windows throws a total fit when you change that kind of stuff.
Does Acronis have some workaround? My first instinct would be that would not be trustworthy...

[ericscottf]

Originally Posted by Opus4

There's a sticky with a whole series of FAQs for this type of question at the top of this forum.

And, no, you don't really want to just copy the entire old SageTV directory to a new computer unless everything really is exactly the same.

- Andy

Can you tell me what you mean by "exactly the same"? I'm going to have the same drive letters, same USB/PCI devices, same hardware, except my mobo and its more subtle features (NB, SB, bios, manuf, quantity of USB ports) may change.

Does this count as not exactly the same in your eyes?
What's more, how much/does sage store in the standard windows registry (which is gonna be fresh, obviously)

[Opus4]

Originally Posted by ericscottf

Can you tell me what you mean by "exactly the same"? I'm going to have the same drive letters, same USB/PCI devices, same hardware, except my mobo and its more subtle features (NB, SB, bios, manuf, quantity of USB ports) may change.

The way I view it is that if something is different, it isn't exactly the same.

- Andy

[ericscottf]

Originally Posted by Opus4

The way I view it is that if something is different, it isn't exactly the same.

- Andy

Not to be pedantic, but certainly there are changes that would have an effect on sage and ones that wouldn't. I was just wondering where that line might be drawn when it comes to new mobos.

thanks

[davephan]

Which version of Acronis do you have? The commercial Workstation 10 has the Universal option. The home version has a similar option. I don't know if you can purchase the option after the failure has occurred, maybe.

I have recovered to a different system board, an Abit to a Biostar, with the same chipset before I had Universal Recovery. I had to get a lot of devices to work properly, but in the end, it worked without a manual recovery.

You might consider replacing it with a similar system board, even it if it a used system board. That will buy you time to rebuild a better system with a different system board.

If you have a second drive, you can try running the second drive and find out if it works on the new system board. If it works well enough, then you can take an image of that. Then rebuild the system from scratch on your own time schedule, hopefully with a new system board. That way you can have both systems running at the same time -- it will make it a lot easier to remember all the programs and configurations.

Dave

[ericscottf]

The place i got this mobo from has more of them, and what's more at only $50. So i can be up and running with a mobo i won't trust in a matter of about an hour... I just hate to throw money at a product with a track record like this one... better the devil you know, i suppose...

If i don't see another reasonably priced mobo with all the features i want, i'll wind up getting this one simply because i won't have a choice.
I run an X10 firecracker off this computer, so i need a "real" serial port on the mobo. That's hard to come by these days.

[davephan]

That's one way to get SageTV working sooner. You might still consider a different system board later. If you upgrade to a newer and better system board, then you might also have to upgrade the CPU, cooler, and memory. Hopefully not the power supply too.

I went with the i-7 950 CPU quad-core and the Gigabyte GA-EX580UD5 for my last and forth system build. When my first SageTV computer with an Abit system board suddenly failed, I recovered to an older, slower computer with an image. The older computer couldn't playback compressed video into MVP extenders, since it did not have enough processing power. It got me by until I could build up dual-core system. Now I have HD-200 extenders though. Later, I upgraded to the present i-7 quad core and also bought a duplicate system board, CPU, cooler, and memory as a general purpose computer, and backup hardware for the SageTV computer.

If the system board needs a special serial port, maybe you could get a card that would do that. Upgrading the system board also gives you a chance to get more PCI, PCI-e slots, SATA, and more USB. It all depends on how much money there is to throw at the problem. It sure is nice to have extra hardware just waiting to replace the current SageTV system.

The next step beyond backup hardware might be using Doubletake software
http://www.doubletake.com/english/Pages/default.aspx

This creates a 'hot' standby computer ready to take over immediately. But Doubletake is pretty expensive.

Dave

[Oats]

You could try a board with the same chipset. I've swapped a P35/ICH9 board with a different brand P35/ICH9R board and didn't need to reinstall. I did go into BOIS and disable a bunch of stuff before booting though. Onboard sound, firewire, IDE, LAN, anything that I didn't need right away. My thought was the less new stuff the better, if it worked I could go and enable it/install drivers later. Then when I was in Windows I uninstalled drivers that were for the old board (except the chipset because they were the same). Then I enabled things I wanted in BOIS and installed the drivers.

[ericscottf]

I got the same board, gonna rma the dead one and have a backup.
when I kill the new one and move to the backup, I'll start shopping for my next system. Hopefully not too soon....

Apparently, mobo boxes no longer list all of the features or even slot qty, so shopping at a store is useless...

[Savage1701]

Originally Posted by ericscottf

My biostar mobo croaked badly last night. It isn't coming back.

I'm going to go pick out a new mobo, and the odds are only 50/50 that I'll wind up with the same one. If i get a new one, I'll have to reinstall my OS/software/etc (ugh...) I'm fairly annoyed with the way this one died, and its customer reviews on newegg are 33% poor, but it has everything I need in a board (except for working...)

What's the best process for getting sage back with all my shows and status and settings?
Once I've got the drivers for my HD-PVRs set up and all, i'm thinking:
Fresh-Install sage
Reboot a few times for good measure
take my old sage folder and dump it right over the installed one

Will this work? If not, what should I do?
I've got all my shows on a separate drive, sage is/was on the OS drive, which I'll mirror to another drive before installing the OS, then cherry-pick the things i want to copy back over.

thanks

I've done the following:

1. I put a folder on each sage drive in my server saying it's drive letter as Sage knows it to be, block size, and what SATA port it is on. Since I know the "true" letter of each drive, if/when the new system gives it a different letter, I can change it back to what it was. That way the Sage files see the same drive letter

2. I've moved a system drive from one board to another within a family - Intel - with success. The c: drive asked for the new sound card drivers, chipset drivers, USB drivers, etc. In my case, it worked, since I was using the system drive as SATA as Enhanced IDE, not a ICH RAID family drive.

3. I have not used that Acronis migration system. Some people love Acronis, some hate it. I am beta testing their Disk Director 11 software right now and it's crashy and buggy. Acronis is not know or loved for their customer service, but they may be the only game in town for you.
Is it elegant? No. Is it good you have a backup image? Yeah. Can it work in a pinch? It has for me, until I can do a full reinstall.

[scoful]

I recently replace my headless server and went to Win7 Ultimate in anticipation of the possibility of CableCard. I simply installed Sage and then copied my prior installation folder over.

I setup the same paths on the new server and copied all of the recorded and imported content.

I had to set up my Hauppauge QAM tuners again, but my FireWire network STB worked out of the chute.

Worked great.