Recordings missing after switching hard drive

[tegat]

I was running GBPVR 1.3.11 (yeah I know it's old but once I have something working well I usually leave well enough alone). All my directories (recordings, live tv, video library, etc) are on a separate media drive from the OS drive where GBPVR is installled. I stopped GBPVR (including recording service) copied all data from old media drive to new media drive, removed old media drive, renamed new media drive to letter of old drive. Now when I start GBPVR, my recording list is empty but they exist on the new drive at the same location. I can see the video library files, etc. from within GBPVR so it's just the recordings that's the problem.

How can I get GBPVR to recognize the recordings again? I need to export the recordings so I can import them into nextpvr since GBPVR is no longer supported.

[bgowland]

GB-PVR will remove any entries in the database of recordings if it can't find them. You say you gave the new media drive the same drive letter but did you copy the recordings to the same folder name?

In other words, on the old media drive if they were in X:\ABC\ and now on the new media drive they're in X:\DEF (same drive letter but different folder) then GB-PVR will have deleted the database entries for them as X:\ABC can't be found.

The safest bet is if you have a backup of the GB-PVR database, stop the recording service, drop the old DB back into place, rename the new media folder to have the same name as the old one then restart the GB-PVR recording service and things (hopefully) will be back to normal.

[sub]

If you've got a recording-dump.xml in your gbpvr directory, you should be able to use the import recordings feature in the config app.

Make sure the filenames are correct though, or they wont reimport.

[tegat]

The folder/file structure is the same on the new drive as it was on the old drive. I see a recording-dump.xml file but it has no entries in it. I also see a gbpvr.db3 file that's almost 1GB. Is that the database where the recording metadata is stored?

[sub]

The folder/file structure is the same on the new drive as it was on the old drive. I see a recording-dump.xml file but it has no entries in it.

Then that last automated export must of happened after your recordings were already 'removed as missing'. If you dont have an older copy of that file with your recordings that you can use import, then you'll probably need to look at those utilities I mentioned above, otherwise you're probably out of luck.

Even if you've got the same file structure, there must have been some stage during you migrating in the new drive, when GBPVR went to load it's recording list and found that the recordings were no longer present in the specified location, so it assumed it you'd manually deleted them, then it proceeded to cleanup the database.

I also see a gbpvr.db3 file that's almost 1GB. Is that the database where the recording metadata is stored?

Yes, part of the database is the metadata, but if your recordings aren't listed then it's probably been deleted from the database.

If you're using an NTFS drive, the application does store a copy of the metadata in the recording itself, which is what those utilities I referred to use to for recreating the recording metadata.

[tegat]

Yes I am using an NTFS drive. When you say "utilities I mentioned above" are you talking about the import/export recordings function? Those seem to expect an xml file.

[martint123]

You could also have a look at the lifesaving vidimport utility:-

http://www.nextpvr.com/nwiki/pmwiki.php?....VidImport

[sub]

Yes I am using an NTFS drive. When you say "utilities I mentioned above" are you talking about the import/export recordings function? Those seem to expect an xml file.

Ah, sorry - I thought I'd mentioned vidImport/MpegImport/RecoverRecordings above, but forgot I deleted that sentence after typing it (to instead recommend the recordings-dump.xml). You can find them on the old GBPVR wiki http://gbpvr.com/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Utility/UtilityIndex

[tegat]

Thanks a bunch. vidImport did the trick.