Odd behavior after brief power outage

[pjpjpjpj]

Yesterday we had a brief power outage (“blink”, in my wife’s terms). My router, extenders, etc., are all on APC UPS/surge protectors, and my server and hard drives are as well. However, I believe the UPS at my server has a bad battery, because it shut off (was making the annoying whine), and had to be rebooted - therefore meaning that the server had a hard shutdown as well. I coached my wife (via phone) on getting it started back up again, and all seemed well.

However, since that point, I have been seeing really odd behavior when playing recordings in Sage. Every show I try to play has bad stuttering when you first start playing it. It plays about one second between stutters. When I jump forward (with “jump 1” or “jump 2” on the extender remote), it will stop for a second (freeze), then the spinning circle will appear, frozen or moving very slowly, then the circle will speed up really fast and the show will jump per the button press. The stuttering still seems to continue at that point, until I jump back to the beginning of the recording. Then it will play just fine, all the way through, as though nothing was ever wrong. I have repeated this behavior regularly. It's almost as if the recording has to buffer or something (like it takes 10 seconds of waiting - either jumping around or just paused) and then it will play fine.

This occurs with recordings on various drives, with recordings made both before and after the power blink. It occurs on all of the extenders in the house. There is no evidence of issues operating the menu, it’s just in playback. It is clearly something with the software and not the recordings, because after a few jumps (as above), it goes away and everything works fine.

Anyone ever seen behavior like this?

ON EDIT: A simple reboot cured it. While you might think "why didn't you try that first?", on a Sage server you have to wait until there is free time between your wife's recordings!

[gplasky]

You may want to run chkdsk on your C drive. If there are issues hopefully that will clean it up. Go to the Properties of the drive and then tools. Check for it to correct and fix errors. It will tell you it will run it on the next boot. Be prepared it could take a while to run with no way of knowing how long. I'm talking hours so you may want to do this when no recording is expected and right around bedtime. And what you don't want to do is power it down once chkdsk starts because you think it is taking too long. That would cause more damage.

Gerry

[pjpjpjpj]

Thanks, Gerry - I'm probably due for a scan and a defrag anyway. I just need to find a window where nothing is recording (my wife, of all things, has started recording late-night poker shows! ).

Update: after having bad stuttering problems once this morning, she just reported that the show she is currently watching started right up, just fine. Hmmm.

[gplasky]

If there are truly bad sectors on the drive this is a normal symptom where some recordings are fine and some have issues. Just depends where on the drive the recording lies in comparison to the bad sectors.

Gerry

[pjpjpjpj]

That's the thing, though - the area of a recording has nothing to do with it. It stutters when I start watching a recording, then clears up after a few seconds (and some jumping around). But after it "fixes", the entire recording is just fine - even the parts at the beginning that were stuttering earlier.

As I said, it's almost like there's invisible buffering going on... like it needs about 10 seconds after you first start watching a recording (whether you jump around, pause, whatever) before it start working normally.

[mistergq]

I would still run checkdisk as well defrag the hard drives.

It also could have been that windows or another utilities were running in the background and fighting over cpu usage as well as memory resources.