New to Sagetv - Recording Issue

[Rockhopper]

Greetings. Finally made the plunge into the world of Sagetv. Well, actually I'm just getting my feet wet as I haven't officially cut the cable.

Anyways, I've set up a Sage server hooked up to 2 dual tuner HDHomeruns (OTA) feeding one HD300 extender on the main TV (more extenders to come once I get some more money). Everything has worked pretty well so far with just a few minor bumps along the way.

Tuesday night I wanted to stress test the system, so I set it up to record 3 HD shows at once (Glee, No Ordinary Family and The Biggest Loser). Everything appeared to be recorded OK when I checked the system just before 9pm. Last night, when I looked into my recordings, none of these shows appeared & I cannot find them on the hard drive. Funny thing is, I also taped V that night, which ran right after these shows, and it is still there.

Any ideas why these shows would've disappeared? I'm not running any plugins, just the basic Sagetv 7 Media Center.

[Fuzzy]

Check to see if you have and System Messages. They may lead you to a conclusion. Beyond that, there's also the debug logs, though they are turned off by default. I'd go ahead and turn them no now for future troubleshooting (Detailed Setup -> Advanced -> Debug Logging)

[pjpjpjpj]

Make sure you weren't accidentally looking at "archived" recordings, but were looking at "current" (or "all"). Don't click "ok" on the "TV" menu item, but use the right arrow and manually go to "current". With the press of "OK" on the "TV" item, Sage defaults to the most recently-viewed recordings view, so if you (or someone in the house) had recently looked at archived recordings, you might not have realized that this is what you were looking at.

If not that, perhaps check your settings for how many recordings to keep and how long to keep them (are you recording these as favorites or were they all manual)? Perhaps something is strange there.

Edit: now that I think about it, if the show you recorded after (V) is showing, I guess you weren't looking at archived recordings. So try my second thought?

[osx-addict]

As a current Tivo user I'm in the same boat and finding the UI a little bit of a challenge to get used to.. I've got virtually the same setup as you do (I've got two HDHomeRuns and two HD300's) but I thought a 'favorite' was like a Tivo season pass and found the hardway that was not the case.. Anyway, when I get some spare time I'll be reading the users guide..

By the way.. I'm currently using SageTV 6.6 on a Mac.. If I move to a PC running 7, is the UI that shows up on the HD300 going to look different? Just curious..

[Rockhopper]

Checked system messages & there were none. Debugging was off, but it's turned on now. I tried to replicate what happened & this time around it said my hard disk space was low. Of course, I have a brand new 1.5TB drive in the system specifically for recordings, so the space couldn't be low. When I went to look at the drive, it was no longer in Windows Explorer & I had to reboot to get the drive back. Looks like it may be a hardware issue.

[robogeek]

Originally Posted by Rockhopper

Checked system messages & there were none. Debugging was off, but it's turned on now. I tried to replicate what happened & this time around it said my hard disk space was low. Of course, I have a brand new 1.5TB drive in the system specifically for recordings, so the space couldn't be low. When I went to look at the drive, it was no longer in Windows Explorer & I had to reboot to get the drive back. Looks like it may be a hardware issue.

If you are using any kind of power management (BIOS or Windows) to spin down the hard drives when idle, try turning it off and see if the problem goes away. A hard drive disappearing in Windows can by a symptom of a timeout condition in the SATA AHCI driver caused by the drive not spinning up fast enough which causes an error in the SATA AHCI driver and the disk is no longer seen in Windows until Windows is restarted. If that turns out to be your problem and you want to try to get power management working again, check the Microsoft web site to see if there is a hotfix available yet or check the PC/motherboard/controller manufacturer web site to see if there are any updated SATA AHCI drivers available for your SATA interface.

[Rockhopper]

Originally Posted by robogeek

If you are using any kind of power management (BIOS or Windows) to spin down the hard drives when idle, try turning it off and see if the problem goes away. A hard drive disappearing in Windows can by a symptom of a timeout condition in the SATA AHCI driver caused by the drive not spinning up fast enough which causes an error in the SATA AHCI driver and the disk is no longer seen in Windows until Windows is restarted. If that turns out to be your problem and you want to try to get power management working again, check the Microsoft web site to see if there is a hotfix available yet or check the PC/motherboard/controller manufacturer web site to see if there are any updated SATA AHCI drivers available for your SATA interface.

That appears to be the problem. For some reason the hard drive was spinning down even though I was actively recording to it. Windows would instantly try to spin it back up, but because it was slower at spinning up, windows would just disable it. Then I'd get a recording error.

I've disabled "spinning down" in the power management options and I also installed a recommended hotfix for larger hard drives that allows them more time to spin up. Recorded 3 HD shows and 1 SD show at the same time late last night with no problems. I'm going to try and stress it again tonight to see if this fix works.