Free space suddenly being reported incorrectly

[budgie]

All,

I'm using the version of Sage that came out before 4 ... 2.2.8, I believe ... with the Malore STV. It's been running ok for about 8 months without issue, except for one time a couple of months ago. I had plenty of free space on the drive that I record to, but Sage suddenly reported zero free space. I tried closing and restarting Sage and restarting the service, but that didn't help. Finally, I just rebooted and the problem cleared up.

This issue has happened again this morning, but rebooting will not fix it. The sypmtoms are slightly different as well: it is reporting that I have 2.7GB free instead of zero. In actuality, I have about 35GB free, which is what Sage properly saw last night. I double-checked the drive in Windows Explorer and everything looks right. Also, when I look at my list of recorded shows in the Sage menu, everything looks correct, just as it did before this happened.

I've had to disable Sage so that it doesn't record anything new, or else it might think it has run out of space and start deleting things. Hoping there's a quick'n'easy solution to this ...?

Any help muchly appreciated!

Thanks,
Ron

[Opus4]

If you have something like Norton Protected Recycle Bin, then your deleted files don't actually get deleted right away & that space appears to still be used according to SageTV.

- Andy

[budgie]

Thanks for the response. I didn't delete anything between the time it looked fine last night and this morning. While I do have Norton on there (don't recall if I have the protected recycle bin or not), it's been on there since I built the box last spring and I never saw this behavior from Sage until the incident a couple of months ago (which a reboot cleared up). Plus, to go from ~35GB to ~3GB overnight would be a pretty noticeable deletion!

Is there possibly a Sage file (wiz.bin?) that could be corrupted? What happens if I rename my wiz.bin and restart Sage (and the service) ... would it generate a new one based on the recorded programs it finds and perhaps clear up the problem? After I rebooted this morning, I did try to rename my wiz.bin and use the wiz.bak, but the timestamps were only a minute apart, so (not surprisingly) it didn't have any effect.

Thanks again ... I'm biting my nails until I get home to troubleshoot this, as my DVR is pretty much toast until this is resolved.

Best,
Ron

[Opus4]

If you delete your wiz.bin, you will lose all info on those recorded shows & they will be imported instead.

Where are you getting your report of free space? Check the System Info screen for Available Video Diskspace. If it is low there, then check for protected deleted files, large swap files, large temp files, etc. SageTV is getting its disk space info from Windows.

Also, check the allowed space to be used in Detailed Setup -> General -> Video Recording Directories -- that will tell you what SageTV thinks it should be allowed to use.

- Andy

[budgie]

I'm using the Malore STV, and in the upper left corner, it shows 2.7GB free. I went to the detailed info and it also said 2.7 available diskspace free. When I go to the properties of the drive in Windows Explorer, it shows several dozen GB free (forget exactly how many). When I get home, I'll double-check the disk space alloted to Sage for recordings, but it should be essentially the whole drive; I haven't changed the setting since I first set it up. If Sage is getting the disk usage from Windows, then that's really the only explanation is that the allotment somehow got changed. I hope it will be that simple (although I'll want to know how that would have happened)!!

Thanks again for your help ... I will double-check the recycle bin and the allotment settings. If anything else comes to mind that I should examine or try, please post it ... I'll be leaving work in a few hours and will be going straight to my Sage box.

Best,
Ron

[budgie]

Resolved! With a mea culpa.

My wife had found that the Sage box appeared to be powered down early this morning, and upon repowering, apparently Sage wasn't recognizing the STBs. She ran through the setup to fix this successfully, but it appears that this (or something related to the apparent crash) reset some of the options to the defaults ... including setting the recording path to the Sage installation directory. D'oh! This dir resides on a small application partition I set up, while my real recording dir is on another (large) drive. So that explains why I saw all of my stored programming in my menu (because the wiz.bin was fine), but saw my drive usage as zero for recording (nothing was recorded on my apps partition) and had so little drive space available. Good lord!

Anyway, the reason I didn't suspect any of this was because of the previous incident a couple of months ago that was extremely similar to this -- and that incident wasn't preceded by any kind of crash and was fixed by a reboot. If that incident hadn't happened, I probably would have looked at this one from a different angle.

Bottom line, I'm back in business, and outside of the incident from a couple of months ago (which did happen, I swear! ), Sage has been running flawlessly for me since I installed it close to a year ago. So thanks for the killer app and the great forum!! I feel a little silly about this now, but maybe this thread will help someone else in the future ...

Thanks again,
Ron