Sage Acting Weird, Then Lost All Data In Program Guide?

[PeteCress]

SageTV, running as a service under WHS, started acting funny this evening: evening news stopped a couple times and I had to turn off the HD200 and re-start it.

After dinner, I went back to trying to config my "Luggable" TV and Sage seemed to bite the big one: HD200 could not connect, then it could... then it couldn't.

Turned off all the routers/switches and re-booted WHS.

No improvement.

Then I figured I'd see how well PlaceShifter was working from my main PC.

Oops! Program Guide appears to have lost *everything*..... just has "No Data" for all shows/times.
Also the list of recordings is totally empty.

Checked SageTV.Properties and it is still pointing to the right place for Wiz.bin. OTOH, the Wiz.bin in the backup path has not been updated since back in March.

The current Wiz.bin is pretty hefty: 4,723 KB... so it's not like Sage suddenly decided to start anew with an empty Wiz.bin....

I shut the server down and will leave it turned off until I come up with a plan of action.

Is there a way to tell if Wiz.bin is actually hosed or how badly it is hosed?

Seems at least possible that it's not Wiz.bin but something else. Reason: when I copy that old backup copy from back in March and replace the existing Wiz.bin with it, the same two symptoms persist: "No Data" in program guide and "No Recordings" under "SageTV Recordings.

Recovery possibilities?

Anybody been here?

[gplasky]

There should be a wiz.bin backup (wiz.bak) in your Sage directory. My wiz.bin is 17,360 kb on my WHS. I'm in the middle of adding another HDHR, scanning the channels and removing my analog tuners. I have 85 clear QAM statoins thru Comcast now including the SD 1-77 channels. My wiz.bak is 25,988 kb. Maybe try bringing it back up and see if it fixed itself. If not stop the service and copy out your wiz.bin, delete it from the SageTV directory and rename you wiz.bak to wiz.bin and see what happens.

Gerry

[mayamaniac]

I think your channel lineup has changed. This happened to me recently with the "No Data" symptom. I went into all my tuner sources and updated the program guide and all was well again.

[PeteCress]

Originally Posted by mayamaniac

I think your channel lineup has changed. This happened to me recently with the "No Data" symptom. I went into all my tuner sources and updated the program guide and all was well again.

That sounds hopeful - and consistant with my observation that things did not improve when I substituted an old copy of Wiz.bin.

Did your "Recordings" list become empty at the same time?

[PeteCress]

Originally Posted by PeteCress

That sounds hopeful - and consistant with my observation that things did not improve when I substituted an old copy of Wiz.bin.

I re-scanned the HD HomeRuns with Sage stopped, and then fired Sage back up and did a Setup | Setup VIdeo Sources | Channel Setup | Scan For Available Channels for each of the four tuners; but no luck.

Just restored Wiz.bin from a 6/16 backup and guess what?

Yup.... recordings are there, Program Guide populated...

Also, the file is about 2 megs larger than the one that was apparently hosed.

Go figure...


One thing I got out of this is that I'm going to amend my backup scheme:

1. Take a full backup of the entire SageTV folder, not just the props files. Didn't need it this time, but who knows.... seems like being able to rename the SageTV directory and then restore, say, yesterday's copy would be a Very Nice To Have. I'll continue keeping Wiz.bin in another directory so it's independent of any SageTV directory restores.
2. Do all Sage-related backups twice: once to my removable media that gets cycled with copies at work, but again to a local drive - so I don't have to depend on going to work to restore a certain generation of something.

Question For The WHS Illuminati: Is there a way to tell WHS to back up stuff on it's own drives? Specifically, C:\Program Files\SageTV and Shares\Software\SageDB (which is where I keep Wiz.ini).

That would give me the "local drive" option I was going on about in item #2.

[mayamaniac]

Originally Posted by PeteCress

That sounds hopeful - and consistant with my observation that things did not improve when I substituted an old copy of Wiz.bin.

Did your "Recordings" list become empty at the same time?

if you don't have guide data, then yes, the recording list wil be empty.

Originally Posted by PeteCress

I re-scanned the HD HomeRuns with Sage stopped, and then fired Sage back up and did a Setup | Setup VIdeo Sources | Channel Setup | Scan For Available Channels for each of the four tuners; but no luck.

Just restored Wiz.bin from a 6/16 backup and guess what?

Yup.... recordings are there, Program Guide populated...

Also, the file is about 2 megs larger than the one that was apparently hosed.

Go figure...

Just make sure your guide data is populated for the next two weeks ahead. What I did was not just rescan channels, I actually changed the guide data source by entering zip code and picking an updated lineup. Then I rescan it.

One thing I got out of this is that I'm going to amend my backup scheme:

1. Take a full backup of the entire SageTV folder, not just the props files. Didn't need it this time, but who knows.... seems like being able to rename the SageTV directory and then restore, say, yesterday's copy would be a Very Nice To Have. I'll continue keeping Wiz.bin in another directory so it's independent of any SageTV directory restores.
2. Do all Sage-related backups twice: once to my removable media that gets cycled with copies at work, but again to a local drive - so I don't have to depend on going to work to restore a certain generation of something.

You don't need to backup the whole SageTV folder, just sage.properties and wiz.bin. For a while now, I use the backup procedure detailed in my signature below. It works quite well.

[PeteCress]

Originally Posted by mayamaniac

Just make sure your guide data is populated for the next two weeks ahead. What I did was not just rescan channels, I actually changed the guide data source by entering zip code and picking an updated lineup. Then I rescan it.

It's not there for two weeks. Only out to 6/28.

Where did you re-specify the zip code?

[mayamaniac]

Originally Posted by PeteCress

It's not there for two weeks. Only out to 6/28.

Where did you re-specify the zip code?

When you run the tuner setup wizard, it always ask for it. But to edit the lineup of an existing tuner, you select the tuner in Setup Video Sources, then select the tuner you want to change the lineup, then select where it says EPG Lineup ...

My lineup can see up to 7/02.