Reinstall Sage - can I just copy my SageTV folder?

[wayner]

It looks like I may have to reinstall my OS (WHS) due to a bad hard drive. I have been backing up my \Program Files\SageTV folder on a daily basis. Can I just reinstall Sage and then copy this old SageTV folder over the new one and have everything working as it was? Including all of my addins like SageMC, SRE, SJQ, Jetty, Web browser, etc?

[Clift]

Short answer: yes

Long answer: It depends. And by that I mean that some plugins require some other things to be installed/modified. For example, you may have to redefine your firewall preferences, or make sure you have the correct version of Java installed etc. but in general, you should be able to install SageTV, copy the program files folder over, start SageTV, then enjoy a beer. But don't be surprised if you may have to tweak this or that just to get it exactly as it was.

[wayner]

Thanks Clift - it looks like my Sage/WHS system may have a bad system hard drive. Either that or the OS is hosed. Either way the solution involves reinstalling the OS.

I love everything about WHS with one exception - you can't backup your WHS system! To me that is totally stupid. So now I have to reinstall OS, let it rebuild drive indexes, install hardware drivers for my tuner cards, USB-UIRT, etc. Then install Sage and hope all is well. Arrgghh!

[davephan]

Originally Posted by wayner

Thanks Clift - it looks like my Sage/WHS system may have a bad system hard drive. Either that or the OS is hosed. Either way the solution involves reinstalling the OS.

I love everything about WHS with one exception - you can't backup your WHS system! To me that is totally stupid. So now I have to reinstall OS, let it rebuild drive indexes, install hardware drivers for my tuner cards, USB-UIRT, etc. Then install Sage and hope all is well. Arrgghh!

That's the main downside to using WHS! If you had built SageTV on another operating system, the recovery would be very simple and quick. Is it possible to use RAID 1 on the OS and tombstones drives with WHS after you rebuild it manually? Then it would be less likely you'll be repeating the manual rebuild again in the future.

I thought about using a WHS just for the video file storage, but that seems a bit much for two computers just for the SageTV computer and file system computer. RAID would be cheaper, but less flexible than WHS.

Dave

[CollinR]

I don't get it what happens if you acronis the drive on another machine if it won't install on WHS?

[davephan]

Originally Posted by CollinR

I don't get it what happens if you acronis the drive on another machine if it won't install on WHS?

If you had one computer with XP or Windows 7 as your SageTV computer you could recover with images. The storage WHS computer would still need to be recovered by rebuilding from scratch. At least a lot of the programs and variables with SageTV and other programs would not have to be re-done from scratch.

Then you would get the benefits of WHS storage and the ease of recovering the SageTV system with an image. But I think it is more cost effective to just use RAID on the SageTV system running XP or Windows 7.

I've sent Acronis e-mails to try and determine if their product will work with WHS, which is not listed on their web site. I keep getting mixed answers from people that are obviously from India and do not understand English, not very technical questions, or both! So far, I haven't found an imaging program that works with WHS. Maybe PING would, but it would need to be tested by someone. PING is a free imaging program that creates the image and recovers the image with the operating system not running from a boot CD.

Dave

[jrh995]

So far, I haven't found an imaging program that works with WHS.

Excuse my ignorance if I'm off base here as I know absolutely nothing about WHS.
I use DriveImage XML with XP for backing up my OS, which works well.

This is what their FAQ page says:

Q. What Operating Systems are supported?

A. With the software installed on a PC, supported file systems are Windows XP, Windows Media Center, Windows Server 2003, Vista, and Windows 7. However you can create a BartPE CD with our software on it and boot from any of the Windows 9x or Windows 2000 machines and back them up as well.

Is "Windows Server 2003" WHS?

Just trying to help.

John

[davephan]

Originally Posted by jrh995

Excuse my ignorance if I'm off base here as I know absolutely nothing about WHS.
I use DriveImage XML with XP for backing up my OS, which works well.

This is what their FAQ page says:


Is "Windows Server 2003" WHS?

Just trying to help.

John

No, Windows Home Server (WHS) is not Windows 2003, just as XP is not Windows 2003. Windows Home Server has the ability to create a drive pool. Hard drives of different sizes form the redundant drive pool. This is unlike RAID where the drives have to be the same size. Windows Home Server is designed to backup other computers. However the shortcoming of WHS is that it can backup its own operating system. I haven't found any imaging software that will backup WHS yet.

Therefore, if you want to restore to a point in time in the past with WHS, you have to rebuild from scratch, which is a serious drawback.

Dave

[jrh995]

Dave,
Thanks for the clarification.
John

[stevech]

Drive pool.
Bad.
No redundancy or error recovery for drive failure, unless you software-dupe the files. And for Gigabyte videos, that's impractical.

IMO, it's very inferior to RAID1 protection.

[Peter_h]

This is interesting. I am in the very same situation. Sage on WHS, facing a reinstall.

I woke up at 1am on Saturday to continual reboots from the server. Attached a monitor to check things out and immediate blue screen after the "windows is loading screen".

The difference between our setups is, I was running the OS on a RAID1. Had it been a drive failure, i would have been fine. However, what I believe happened was I was using the on board RAID on the MB. I also did not have a UPS on the server. So, it looks like I got a power blip and then some data corruption.

So the lessons I learned are:

1.) Get a UPS.
2.) Get a real RAID card with battery backup and write cacheing.

So, I went out and bought a UPS and have an ARECA RAID card with Battery backup coming from newegg.

[davephan]

Your corruption issue could have recovered with an image if you were not using WHS for a SageTV computer. Instead using XP or Windows 7. A UPS might not have helped if it was something else that caused the problem.

I'm not sure how WHS would not be effective to protect video files with redundancy. I thought the drive pool was supposed to be redundant. A drive could fail, and you would not loose anything. The failed drive is then replaced, and the new drive rebuilds. As I understand it, if you have to re-install the WHS OS, the pool files will be recognized when the WHS is restored from a scratch install.

The downside to WHS as I see it, is if you customize the system by adding SageTV, other programs, and hundreds or thousands of parameter customizations. Then recovering it would be a pain if the WHS OS were to fail, requiring a scratch build and all those customizations.

If the WHS computer was only used for video storage, then the number of changes to the original OS install could be kept to a minimum, making recovery easier. However this would require two computers to separate the SageTV application and video file storage.

I've thought about using RAID, but the more I read about RAID cards, the more I read about them not supporting large TB drives. Which ARECA RAID card did you order?


Dave

[Peter_h]

Yeah, I know I could have recovered if I wasn't running WHS and running a different OS and had an image. We use Acronis TI home and Echo Server at work to do regular backups/restores.

Hard to say if a UPS would have helped but everything pointed to corrupt files on the OS partition and there was a power blip.

The WHS OS is not part of the pool. When you install WHS it creates a separate partition for the OS to reside on. Therefore, the OS is only on one drive and if that drive fails, you are screwed.

The drive pool has folders. You create folders and then can select which folders you would like to have redundancy for.

You are correct, the huge downside to using WHS and sage is all the customization needed to get sage up and no real way to back it up.

I ordered this RAID card an Areca ARC-1210 along with the battery backup to enable write cacheing.

[stevech]

Why can't Acronis or whatever be used to backup the OS partition? Isn't it just an NTFS? Or did they muck with the partition tables?

[gplasky]

It's not the C [artition that is the issue. It is the D partition which hold the tombstones that point to the files in the share. WHS creates a C and D partition on the OS drive. Those tombstones are constantly changing based on files movement n the shares. (copies, moves, deletions) Also WHS is a server-based OS and usually requires the more expensive imaging software that works on servers OS.

Gerry

[davephan]

Acronis support said that they did not have any product that could image the Windows Home Server operating system, including their server imaging software. They may be looking at developing software for it, although they weren't clear about it.

PING, Partition Image is Not Ghost might or might not work. PING is free software and creates the image and recovers the image from a bootable CD with the operating system not running.

If an image was taken of the boot drive and tombstones drive, I don't know what would happen if the system was recovered to a point in time in the past. Maybe the operating system wouldn't boot, maybe the files that changed since the time of the image would be orphaned, or maybe it would work. I tried to get an answer from PING support, and they did not seem to know the answer. PING does work for other Windows operating systems and even works for Linux. But the answer if PING works for WHS recoveries is not known yet.

PING would need to be tested several times to make sure that recoveries work and they are consistently reliable.

Dave

[scat]

My son's computer was upgraded to a Windows 7 Ultimate 64 bit from Vista Ultimated 64 bit.

1.) Prior to installing Win7
copied my SageTV folder to another computer
copied my EventGhost folder to another computer

2.) Installed a fresh install and not a upgrade from Vista
Ultimated 64 bit.
3.) Installed Sage Client V6_5_98 Setup
4.) Installed EventGhost
5.) Installed Win7 USB-UIRT driver
6.) Copy SageTV from backup computer to Windows 7 computer overwriting all.
7.) Copy EventGhost from backup computer to Windows 7 computer overwriting all.
8.) When starting Sage Client enter license key then I was prompted to reimport my plug-ins.

Everything worked just as before.
except the Win7 taskbar staying shown all the time over applications that alot are complaining about, I set this to Auto Hide

Scat

[Peter_h]

Originally Posted by davephan

Acronis support said that they did not have any product that could image the Windows Home Server operating system, including their server imaging software. They may be looking at developing software for it, although they weren't clear about it.

PING, Partition Image is Not Ghost might or might not work. PING is free software and creates the image and recovers the image from a bootable CD with the operating system not running.

If an image was taken of the boot drive and tombstones drive, I don't know what would happen if the system was recovered to a point in time in the past. Maybe the operating system wouldn't boot, maybe the files that changed since the time of the image would be orphaned, or maybe it would work. I tried to get an answer from PING support, and they did not seem to know the answer. PING does work for other Windows operating systems and even works for Linux. But the answer if PING works for WHS recoveries is not known yet.

PING would need to be tested several times to make sure that recoveries work and they are consistently reliable.

Dave

Very bad things happen. The tombstones don't match the data so all of the data that is new after the image was made basically become lost. WHS then throws a ton of drive errors, duplicate files, and file corruption.

I tried it when I trialed WHS b/c I wanted to see what would happen. It's not a good situation.

[wayner]

Originally Posted by Peter_h

Very bad things happen. The tombstones don't match the data so all of the data that is new after the image was made basically become lost. WHS then throws a ton of drive errors, duplicate files, and file corruption.

Is this true even if you just want to image the 20GB C: system partition? Aren't the tombstones stored in the Data partition on the first drive?

Could you "simulate" an image where you just backed up all folders/files from your C: partition and also backed up your registry? Then to rebuild your system it would just be a case of copying over all of the files (to do this I am guessing you would have to attach the hard drive to another PC where it is not running the OS) and restoring the registry backup.

Is there any reason why that would not work?

[Peter_h]

Yes, it is possible to just backup a partiton on a drive using a backup software. Even Acronis TI home edition will do that.

That's something i've been thinking about since this thread started that I never tested nor have a i read about anyone trying.

A server reinstall to reclaim data on the pool drives requires the following.

1.) remove pool drives
2.) insert WHS and do a fresh install on OS drive, creates a "C" partitoin for OS and a "D:" partition for data/tombstones
3.) power down and install pool drives
4.) boot into installer and choose reinstall which will rebuild the tombstones to the data drives.

To me, it sounds like step 4 does not touch the C partition and only writes to the D: partion to rebuild the tombstones.

So, what happens if for step 2, you have image of the C: partion and restore it on to the OS drive of a live install and then pop in the install CD. Will you be given the option to reinstall and rebuild the tombstones? I don't know. WHS is really picky when it comes to when it gives you the reinstall prompt.

My thinking is that when you pop in the WHS DVD it checks to see if there is a current install and then checks the tombstone references so in theory, it sounds like it would work.

Hmm, I need to test this out just to see what happens. I'm really curious now.