Mucked up replacing hard disk?

[mof]

Like most I record more than I can watch and eventually filled my hard disk.
I thought I was being clever when I copied the contents of the overloaded disk to a new larger disk. I then renamed the new disk to the same drive letter that I had originally.
Despite renaming the disk I somehow lost the recordings data base, but much worse than this - I seem to have corrupted the mpeg files themselves. They appear to be the right length, but the time index is screwed up. The files play (in GBPVR or Windows media player) for a few minutes, but then hang up. I am unable to fast forward them and can't see more than the first half hour or so of each recording. I am completely gutted as having seen the files copy over to the new disk and checked the length, and even checked the first few seconds of the copies - I then felt confident enough to delete them from the original drive!
Does anyone know how to fix this?
Or how to avoid it next time I fill a disk and have to fit a bigger one?

[Carlito]

make sure the recording service is stopped before moving any files around.
Also, there is an option in config.xml named <AutoRemoveMissingRecordings>
set it to false so gbpvr won't delete files it thinks have been deleted manually.

Not sure about the file corruption though..sorry

[mof]

Thanks for your reply Carlito - Not stopping the recording service was a dumb move. The loss of the recordings database is academic if I can't get the mpegs to play. I can't figure that out at all.
A procedure for replacing the hard disk wasn't obvious in the wiki. If I get this sorted I'll try to get something added.

[stustunz]

mpeg import is the program you need to get them back into your database (its on the wiki)
only does 1 file at a time but works well

very strange that your files got screwed up i transfer mine all the time and they are fine
my only thought was the hard drive you moived them to was fat32 but then i would have thought it would have told you about the meta data etc been lost if you move them

did you do a bulk move or one at a time ?

maybe it hadnt finished copying and you shut down the pc or it crashed ?

the hard drive you moved them to how old is it ?

[dark_half]

When the EPG is updated daily a file called "recording-dump.xml" is created with all the show info. If it still has the show info you can import it into the database. Run config.exe > plugin and there is an option to import recordings and point that at your xml file with the show details.

[martint123]

There is also a .bak file so if you missed it today, you can go back one extra day to recover. I make sure these are in my backups.

[mof]

Many thanks to you all for your suggestions...

The new HD was formatted for NTFS so should cope with the longer files, but even recordings under 1GB seem to be corrupted.
I used a LaCIE disk backup utility to copy the data from the original drive. I'm beginning to suspect that it must be the problem (fat lot of good a backup utility that corrupts the files is!).
What's vexing is that the mpg2 files play for a while before crashing. If the backup utility was attempting to compress the data I guess they wouldn't play at all.

[Kevina]

I am facing a similar issue. My original system drive failed, forcing me to install a new drive and reinstall everything from scratch. As a part of the drive replacement, I move all recordings off of the system drive and onto an additional drive in the system. I then used Video Archive to scan all my drives and create an export.xml file. Then I attempted to import the list of recorded files through Config.exe. To my surprise, it didn't import anything, saying that all of the records either already existed, or had been moved from their original locations.

Obviously they had been moved from their original locations, but I had done this previously and the import just updated the drive letter in the database and all was well. I'm now guessing that since my <AutoRemoveMissingRecordings> flag was set to true that GBPVR deleted all my "missing" recordings before I got to import the new locations from the xml.

So, I'm now faced with the problem of having a new database (with new recordings in it since the reinstall), but without all my old ones. I also have a backup of my old database with all the old recordings in their old locations. Is there any way to merge the two together? I'm sure I can probably just import the old files, but all of the show information and descriptions will be lost.

Any suggestions would be greatly appreciated.

Thanks,
Kevin

[carpeVideo]

Hopefully you still have the old disc - I would reformat the new disc and do the copy over again. If you have a seagate or maxtor drive you can use there free OEM version of acronis do to the copy. -

Then try vidImport : http://gbpvr.com/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Utility/VidImport (I wrote the utility as I was doing the exact same thing you are) or mpegImport -
If you specify vidImport can read the record-dump xml and if filenames are the same it won't duplicate the recording.

Bonus for both if you have non-gpbvr videos it will import those into recordings as well

Kevina the above should work for you as well.

[martint123]

You would have to change the driver letter/directory on the .xml inport file to point to where the files really are.

What I would do is this.
(1) backup new, current databas and backup old, database. "just in case"
(2) Export new, current database with config.
(3) If you can find the exports file on the old drive copy and save it.
(4) edit (maybe with search/replace) the old exports file to reflect where the recordings are now.
(5) import the old, byt modified, exports file.
The last step will merge the old with the new, so you get them all. Any already existing will be ignored.

Good luck. (don't forget the backups!).