Hard drive not recognized by name

[robinson]

I am using external hard-disk enclosures with removable tray support. It works basically the same way as a removable cartridge, but instead of a cartridge I use a regular 200-300GB drives. I have several hard-disks mounted in their own tray and just swap them as needed. The problem is that the drive doesn't always mount under the same drive "letter" -- sometimes it is drive "J", sometimes "K" etc. Although each drive has a unique name/label, Sage completely ignores it and only recognizes these drives by the mounted drive letter as assigned by Windows. This is causing problems with Sage not being able to recognize the content of the drive correctly.

Is there any way to configure SageTV to recognize the drive by its name/label instead of the drive letter? Each drive also has a "SAGE" folder -- that is where recordings get stored. The path shown in Sage "video recording directories" setup looks something like this:
J:\SAGE
K:\SAGE
etc.

What I would like to see is something like this:
J:\DRIVE01\SAGE
J:\DRIVE03\SAGE
K:\DRIVE02\SAGE
K:\DRIVE04\SAGE
(where "DRIVExx" is name/label of the drive)

Could this be done?
Thank you in advance for any advice...

[GKusnick]

Are you just letting Windows assign drive letters as it pleases, or have you gone into Disk Management (under Administrative Tools > Computer Management) and manually assigned specific letters to each drive? If you've done that and they're still not sticking, then that sounds like a device driver issue with your external enclosure such that it's not reporting the drive IDs correctly to Windows.

[robinson]

Thanks, this may help little, but it still doesn't solve the main problem. You can almost think about these as zip disks. If you have 20 of them, you'd want Sage to recognize each by its label, not by the drive they are in.

[GKusnick]

You could mount them to NTFS folders instead of drive letters.

[mcbinder]

Originally Posted by GKusnick

You could mount them to NTFS folders instead of drive letters.

Could you explain that? I have a similar problem with network drives.

mcb

[GKusnick]

In Disk Management, under Change Drive Letter And Paths, one of the choices is "Mount in the following empty NTFS folder". So instead of mounting a new drive as G:, you can mount it as C:\DriveG (or any other path you like). But that's for local drives only, not network drives.

For network drives you're not obliged to use drive letters. Use UNC paths instead (\\server\share).

[robinson]

I just set up one of the drives as a folder to test this. But now looking at Sage Recordings, the recording information still shows the old file path and Recording file size: 0.00 GB. I guess Sage lost track of where the files are. Is there any way to point Sage to the new path so it can re-link the existing recording information with the mpeg files? I have already added the new path to the "New Recording Directories" configuration.

And thank you so much for this tip!!! This is so very promissing, it just might do what I need. If I remove the drive and insert another drive (I use them as cartridges), will I have to mount it as a folder again, or will that be now handled automatically? I would try it, but am afraid that Sage will lose track of those files too.

But the UNC path I like really the most. I wish this was available for USB devices too. I don't know much about network drives, but I am willing to switch if that is the best way to go. Ignorant question: would the UNC path be available for so called NAS devices? (I assume NAS is a network drive.)

I have ethernet 10/100, with a router -- would that be fast enough to use the drive to both record to and read from at the same time? I can do that now with USB2 without any problem. I think I have also seen NAS enclosure that supports removable trays, it just was much more expensive than my USB enclosure. But maybe the prices were down, I'll be checking that tomorrow.

Thank you again very much!!!

[MeInMaui]

Check out this post. I think this is what you will need to do to get sage to see your files in the new path. Good luck.

Aloha,
Mike

[robinson]

Thank you Mike, but the post you linked to is about changing to UNC paths. I don't have network storage yet. I also looked at the FAQ, but so far the only way I could find for the files to get recognized again requires having the old disk and the new disk available for a brief moment at the same time. I don't have that option since I am not changing disks, but rather changing the path to the same disk. At least I don't know how to mount the same disk as a drive "K" and as a "mounted folder" at the same time.

[blade]

Originally Posted by robinson

I also looked at the FAQ, but so far the only way I could find for the files to get recognized again requires having the old disk and the new disk available for a brief moment at the same time. I don't have that option since I am not changing disks, but rather changing the path to the same disk. At least I don't know how to mount the same disk as a drive "K" and as a "mounted folder" at the same time.

That is the only way, but you don't have to use the same disk. Sage just needs to see a disk at drive k. It can be done, I've done it without actually changing disks several times.