Drive died; can't map new network drive

[troycheek]

Good old reliable 1TB drive E: which had been with me some years recently died during a recent power outage/recovery, taking about 800GB of my oldest recordings to the great bit bucket in the sky. I think it was the first drive I bought just for Sage recordings. I had whole series that I swear I was going to get around to watching someday. Really. Luckily, I have a 2TB drive J: about half full of TV recorded since I installed it back in March, so the family wasn't too upset.

I replaced drive E: with another 1TB drive I had handy. Once installed and recognized by Windows Vista, SageTV started recording to it. DirMon2 started running comskip, ccextractor, and my custom mp4 convertor program on the new recordings. Everything is working fine except that in order for my client PC (Windows 7) to access the comskip data and extracted closed captions, I have to map it to a network drive using UNC paths (//CHEEKMAIN-PC/MainE). In spite of setting every share and permission I can find on drive E: to match drive J:, I can't get the client PC to map to server E: or simply navigate to E: as it claims I don't have permission to access the drive. I can however access and/or map to the shared VCR folder on drive E: from any PC on the network.

I vaguely recall having to jump through some hoops to get this to work when I first started using the client PC, but I feel like I've done all that and more this time without the proper results. Anyone have any suggestions?

[pjpjpjpj]

This may be completely and utterly wrong but I recently had a drive die and be replaced, and I had problems with the new drive being recognized. The remedy was to disconnect the new drive, then force a media scan/update (basically getting Sage to notice that everything from that old drive was no longer there), then plug the new drive back in, then do another media scan.

I don't know if this will do it for you, but it's an easy-enough thing to try. Good luck!

[troycheek]

So, apparently when sharing a drive or folder across a network, there are Windows sharing permissions and NTFS sharing permissions and several options for each. If you want any random user on any random computer on your network to be able to access any random file on a drive in your media server PC, you have to make sure the shared item is shared with a user group called Everyone which has read/write access. Yes, I know the official way is to set up user accounts with the right access, but the whole point of the media server PC was to share files with everyone in the household, so Everyone works for me.

The source of the problem that just right-clicking on the drive and telling Windows to share it didn't always give Everyone access. I swear I went through the same steps to share all the SageTV recording directories and some other media folders I wanted to share, but sometimes Everyone wasn't added as an access group, sometimes Everyone was added but wasn't given any access at all, and sometimes Everyone was added and given read/write access. Once I checked everything I was trying to share and manually added/made sure Everyone had the proper access, suddenly the SageTV PC client, the HD200, and all the computers, laptops, tablets, and pads in the house could view media all day long, which is only what I've been trying to do for years. It even solved a problem I had where original recordings in a particular SageTV recording directory could be played fine from other PCs, but mp4 conversions of the same recordings were invisible to those running Windows 7.

Now that I've got all this figured out, I figure the next problem will be another hard drive failure.

tl;dr; It was a Windows problem, not a SageTV problem, after all.

[UgaData]

I realize this is after the fact but what to remember, in general is:

FILE permissions (set on the share) are for across the network access i.e.
so that from PC-A you can access files on PC-B.

On the local machine only NTFS permission apply.

Across the network they both apply.

And of course the easy thing to do is to give EVERYONE FULL control under both FILE and NTFS permissions.