Lost all movies on HDD AGAIN!

[stitch0852]

I am sick to death of these piece of crap devices!

Once again, I insert a HDD to find all 4 TB of my movies have vanished! That is about 400 - 500 or so movies. I have five drives. I power the unit down normally. Then I turn the switch off before pulling my drive. I insert the new drive and ensure it is seated. Turn the switch back on, then use the remote to power it back on.

I have Seagate hard drives. NAS drives so they should work well. I also have regular Seagate drives. This is the second and last time I will lose all the work to get these movies onto a drive only to have the device magically make them go away. It takes days to recover the movies and then many will not work, the files damaged in the recovery.

Have not had power losses nor any other shutdowns that should screw up the files.

The company ignores their customers and leaves us hanging. I have three of these piles of crap and I WILL find another way to put my movies on a hard drive that doesn’t make more work for me down the road every time this thing decides to be a pain in my backside!

Fix these things or pull them off the market permanently!!!

[Mona]

Sorry that you encounter such a problem.
Do you mean the posters of the videos on your HDD are gone from the DMS or the movie videos literally get deleted from the HDD? We do not have such an issue, please offer more info, thank you in advance.

[Procat]

I have all my drives in their own enclosures, and connect it using the USB cable. The less handling the better.

[stitch0852]

I mean when I put the drive in and check the hard drive through the movie server, the drive is empty. Just shows the DVDFAB directory with nothing in the directory. This has happened twice. When I put the drive back into the computer, it also shows no movie files.

I liked the server because it is portable and I can take it to rehab. I load all my drives, each in a protective plastic case, and the server and I can watch my library away from home with no internet.

[tbrown25]

If you are formatting the drives using the media server, I suggest you re-format in NTFS using a PC.

Every drive I have formatted using the server itself has eventually failed, with files just "disappearing" from the drive. The drives cannot even be read using a LINUX system as they come up showing "invalid partition".

I have not had any failures with NTFS formatted drives and ran that way for many years.The last year or so, though, I have switched to putting the files on a NAS. That has worked well for me but I have read reports that 4k movies will not play when read from a NAS. (I don't have an 4k files, so cant attest to that)

Oh, and if the drive is >2 TB, make sure it is configures as a GPT disk.

[stitch0852]

The drives were formatted using the PC to NTFS. The drive is 4 TB.

[Down2Earth]

stitch0852...you may actually have found a design bug. It's a shame this unit isn't supported anymore.

You have five drives and three DMS's and appears that you are hot swapping the drives between the three DMS's. This DMS is not really hot swappable per drives. Just guessing that when you put a different drive in what ever DMS your using and it's a different drive/library, you are rebuilding the library so you are able to see the contents of the drive on the server. Thinking the bug might be with swapping out drives from the different DMS's that you have and it is not retaining (or rebuilding) the library that you are rebuilding and is showing up as a new library via empty blank HDD. Might be a memory issue in the DMS that's hits an allocated number that's throwing this function off from clearing itself out by itself. Not sure....what is strange is, it is wiping out your movies from your HDD from showing up in windows when you mount it to a PC. It should not be doing that.......but appears it is........sometimes it takes a really, really long time to rebuild the library but case in point, your movies is not showing up when mounted to a PC. With three of these units at bay, maybe reach out to Mona as requested with a ticket for much needed help. That is crazy....

[stitch0852]

As I said in my original post, I am not hot swapping the drives. I fully power down the unit, and then turn off the switch in the back before removing the drives. That is why it is so frustrating to lose everything. I am very careful to ensure the unit is fully powered down before pulling the drive and I take care to ensure each drive is correctly seated before powering back up. I ensure I do this since the first time it lost all my movies off the drive. It took days to recover them all and I did not want to go through that again.

I am not looking at the movies through the poster section. I go to the section where the actual files are shown. I rarely swap between different servers. One is in the den for my mother and has one drive in it that is the same. The second unit is in the living room, but since I returned from rehab last month, none of the drives have been used in it. They have only been used in the unit I took with. So not swapping between units causing this. I don’t use the poster view because there is no way to distinguish which of the hundreds of movies shown are on the drive I have installed. I view movies by going to VIDEOS, then selecting the HDD I have installed. This shows the actual files on that HDD in the DVDFAB directory. All of my movies are saved as ISO files, so I can just select one to watch and, if I only pulled the movie, it can sometimes just start playing the next movie. If I ripped the whole disc, then it backs out to the menu of the disc when the movie ends. None of these hard drives were installed into a different DMS since my return home before this happened.

[stitch0852]

The only thing is I upgraded to the latest firmware when I was in rehab, bit the drives continued to work after that.

[october262]

have you tried checking you HDDs for errors ??
connect the HDD to your PC and select properties - tools - select check drives for system errors

[stitch0852]

I have not done that. I shall try that. Thank you.