More Windows Home Server Problems?

[Ken429]

I installed WHS on my network a couple of days ago and all of a sudden the new BTV recorded shows start to do very bad things. Each recording will play for a half hour or so and then the video goes away and the voices warble and there is intermitent crackling and popping noises. I have never had this problem until now. The only thing from WHS on the machine with BTV is the WHS console. I have not moved the BTV files to WHS. Anybody have a clue what is going on?

[rugby]

http://www.engadget.com/2007/12/27/w...orrupts-files/

[Ken429]

Sure looks like my problem. I guess MSFT had better add BTV files that were only on a drive that was being backup to WHS. Kind of scary. I just ran a test and recorded a long video program and did not touch WHS and everything works OK. Thanks for the information. WHS is going on the shelf until it is ready for prime time.

[Dowzmp]

Can I ask where you are storing the BTV recorded files i.e. are they on a WHS volume or are they on disks that have not been added. I was under the impression that the corruption issue only impacted the WHS 'managed' storage itself

BTW - I've been running BTV on WHS quite happily for over a month without any issues. (BTV records to seperate drives outside of the WHS managed ones for I/O reasons)

[Khris]

Originally Posted by Dowzmp

Can I ask where you are storing the BTV recorded files i.e. are they on a WHS volume or are they on disks that have not been added. I was under the impression that the corruption issue only impacted the WHS 'managed' storage itself

BTW - I've been running BTV on WHS quite happily for over a month without any issues. (BTV records to seperate drives outside of the WHS managed ones for I/O reasons)

This is exactly how it should be setup......BTV should not be directly saving files on the WHS drive pool. It should have it's own drive to store recordings.

[Ken429]

Your are correct. The WHS guys do not think they have a problem . The files were NOT stored on WHS. The BTV storage partition is on a dual boot Win XP/Vista system using a Raid 0 array. By mistake I let WHS start to backup the system including the partition where I had the BTV files while in Win XP. I cancelled the back up once I realized what was happening. Maybe just a coincidence but the next time I went to view the recorded programs (two separate recordings) the files were screwed up. BTV is setup under Vista where I spend 99% of the time. I added and deleted some DVD files to this partition and of course Diskeeper was in there trying to defragment. I've killed WHS for now and will see it the problem reoccurs. I have had a corrupted recording once or twice before in the last several years, I thought is was a bad drive in the array. I'm now using two brand new drives so that reason is gone. Any other thoughts?

[Ken429]

Well, Windows Home Server has been gone from the BTV machine for a couple of weeks and I had another 2 hour Recorded TV program file go bad about 1 hour into the two hour recording. At least 10 1 hour recordings were made and viewed over the last week or two and were just fine. The one thing I did NOT do the last time I had this problem was to completely delete all the files in the BTV storage folder. This time around I cleared the video folder and for good measure cleared the "Pool" option in the advanced settings. I then recorded a two hour program and it was OK. I think I'll also turn off Diskeeper 2007 on this BTV storage partition. Could the index(?) files that BTV puts in the video storage folder been corupted and that is what is/was causing the problem or could playing with the Pool setting have screwed something up? Seems strange that one hour recordings are ok yet the 2 hour recordings go bad after the first hour. Again, any ideas on what is going on would be appreciated?

[abednego]

I'm interested to hear how this turned out. Did you resolve your problems?


-abe

[tscales]

I completely gave up on WHS. It was amazing and WOULD have been perfect, but the load balancing was so intrusive that it couldn't stream to BTV Link reliably.

[abednego]

Well, I've sent off for the demo version of the OS, so I'm going to give it a shot on a homebrew computer. I'll keep reading around here to see what's what and hopefully I can get it working.

I appreciate the response, thanks.

[karhill]

Originally Posted by Ken429

Well, Windows Home Server has been gone from the BTV machine for a couple of weeks and I had another 2 hour Recorded TV program file go bad about 1 hour into the two hour recording.

Yes, I agree that Windows Home Server, in the way you were using it, was probably NOT the cause of your corruption problems. You were not storing video on the server (either directly from a BTV recording process or being copied there after a recording). All of your video was stored on a different computer from the WHS. The only WHS interaction with your BTV computer was the WHS backup feature (which is the best feature in WHS, especially implementation wise. It's really really nice.). And the backup service is read only, until you do a restore.

That said, I would not want to have the backup service running while I was doing lots of video file playback on my BTV server (due to cpu and disk contention issues). But the backup service time is configurerable, so just schedule it for some time that you're not likely to be watching video. I'm also not sure that I'd want to backup my video library (it's kind of big, and not really all that critical), but that's a user choice.

The backup service uses the Single Image Store capabilities of Windows Server 2003, which is a really neat idea. The backup client on the PC uses the Volume Shadow Service to snap shot the file system. It then works on a cluster (not file) basis, seeing which clusters have changed since the last backup. It computes hashes of the changed clusters, sends those hashes to the server. The server checks to see if that hash (and thus the corresponding cluster) are stored on the server. If yes, the cluster is already saved on the server and doesn't have to be saved again. If no, then the cluster contents are sent to the server. The incremental backups tend to be very small and fast. If 5 different computers in your house have the file crtdll.dll, only one copy gets stored on the server.

[Darkk]

Honestly, I wouldn't install BTV on a WHS machine due to issues with CPU resources. I do have a Windows 2003 Enterprise R2 64bit server for BTV with hardware RAID 5 setup and it's been flawless for me. The recordings are stored on non-raid external drives while RAID 5 drives are dedicated for "fileserver" functions. It's been running very well for me. Rarely have to reboot it.

I do have the trial version of WHS but since I already have legit licenses of 2003 Server I might as well use em.

for WHS issues I'd wait for SP1 for it.

Darkk