Well, the port multiplier replacement came in and all installed just fine.  Good news is that it was the PMP that had failed.  Bad news is that when I got everything configured as it was before the failure, unRAID decided that those three drives were all new and started clearing them!

I hit the reset button on the unRAID box after only a few seconds…it never budged past 0%, but damage was done.  All drives subsequently showed back up as unformatted when unRAID resumed operation.  I had lost roughly 750GB of TV episodes and my entire NAS drive.

Fortunately, I started a recovery process that, so far, appears to be promising.  I performed it first on the NAS drive.  It involves using reiserfsck commands that are not for the faint-hearted.  However, considering my predicament, I had no choice.

I started out with the following commands that basically just rebuilds the resierfs directory structure.  That’s probably dumbing it down a lot since I’m about the farthest thing from a linux guru.  

root@MEDIASVR:/# /root/samba stop

root@MEDIASVR:/# reiserfsck –scan-whole-partition –rebuild-tree /dev/md4

unRAID has to have the array started, but samba sharing has to be stopped in order for it to begin the rebuild.  After about 5 hours, I had a single lost+found folder that contained many more folders named with seemingly random numbers and over 100 randomly numbered files with no file extension.  After perusing a few of those folders, it appeared as all of my old directories were in them.  I have no idea what the no-extension files are, however.  I’m hoping they’re just old deleted files that were recovered after the fact.

I was a bit more at ease until trying the next drive.  This was the one that contained the bulk of my TV episodes and after starting the rebuild, it ended shortly after upon hitting a bad block.  I now had to do a 

root@MEDIASVR:/# /sbin/badblocks -b 4096 -o badblocks.lst /dev/sde

to generate a list of all the bad blocks that the drive could discover.  This lasted about 5 hours – the same length as a recover.   Once finished, I had to make reiserfsck aware of this list and modify my rebuild command like so,

root@MEDIASVR:/# reiserfsck –scan-whole-partition –rebuild-tree -B badblocks.lst /dev/md5

This allows the bad blocks to be skipped or reallocated – I’m not really sure…I just know that reiserfsck knows when and what to do at bad block.  As I write this I have about 35 minutes to go on the rebuild before I’ll see what the damage is.  Considering my TV show folders begin at three levels deep, I think I should be in pretty good shape at retaining the directory structure I had.  I’ll be doing an RMA on this drive once I get everything moved.  Seagates have 5-year warranties and this one is not even two yet.

After spending a few minutes checking that drive when it’s done, I’ll immediately begin with the third drive.  It was, at most, about 2/3 capacity remaining and was a spillover for the other TV episode drive.  I can only hope for no more bad blocks there so I can get this done tonight and spend tomorrow getting it all back in order to use, while finding out what I’m missing.  I’ll be sure to update tomorrow.

In other news, I received a P3 Kill-A-WATT P4400 device that I had ordered yesterday.  The Kill-A-WATT plugs into a standard 3-prong electrical outlet and allows you to monitor all the characteristics of what is coming out of that outlet to the device that plugs into the Kill-A-WATT.  I can get KWh, line condition, voltage, etc.  I plan on using this on the most used electrical devices in the house to see where we can cut some corners.  Computers, applicances, stereo equipment, etc. will eventually all be tested.  I may start a small index so that others can compare to it and see what their devices are drawing while on.  More on that later.

Some of you may have been using Sam Saffron’s ruby script to scrape TheTVDB for TV show metadata, just to find out that it stopped working a few days ago.  TheTVDB has completely moved to a new API and the old ruby script no longer works.

If you’re in need of a new scraper, Bill Daugherty II has started developing a new application that is working pretty well in its early stages.  You can get the new TV Metadata Finder at his website.  It’s currently only in it the second release, but has been working well enough for me so far.  I expect it to be one of the primary scrapers available over the next few days or weeks.

You can also try TVScout.  It does the same thing, is simple to use and just works.  I still expect to be using Bill’s offering as it appears to eventually offer a little more while not becoming too convoluted.

My port multiplier replacement is also on track to arrive today.  Not a moment too soon.  I was really missing watching my TV shows.  Netflix WatchNow has filled in nicely, but it’s still not a replacement.  I just hope I don’t run into any issues putting in that replacement.  I’ll be sure to post how it all went tomorrow.

The port multiplier module in my newest external SATA enclosure failed this past weekend.  We went to put on an episode of CSI or something and there were no episodes listed.  After checking the other TV series folders, I saw that none of them had any files in them.  Logging into the unRAID web management showed that all drives active in that enclosure had fallen offline.  The three drives consisted of two that held my TV series and the third which was my NAS share.

A series of reboots and connects/disconnects later, I gave up and marked it as a lost port multiplier module.  The good news is that PC-Pitstop is going to let me just remove the module and ship that back instead of sending them the entire unit.  That will save a good $20 on shipping alone.  If you need any storage-related hardware, I highly recommend that shop.  Good products, fair prices and, so far, their support has been terrific.

This whole ordeal has really made me appreciate unRAID so much more.  Had this been a RAID5 array, it would be completely offline right now – with a possibility of data loss.  With unRAID, all I had to do was unassign those “lost” disks, recalculate parity and I was back up and running with all of my movies intact – and protected.  When I get the PMP module back, I can just plug it all back in, assign those disks and recalculate my parity – everything will be just like it was.  The flexibility of unRAID really does astound me.

Last night I replaced the HTPC3 of my in-laws with an old Hp system that has a Sempron 3000+ and 512MB PC-2700…I don’t remember the model number.  The old P4 just wasn’t displaying video on loading Windows anymore.  I’m sure I could have fixed it, but the Hp was already configured and just needed the 11n card for the network.

I still haven’t gotten around to replacing the motherboard in my son’s HTPC.  I might get around to that next weekend.  That’s about it for me.  Not much happening in my HTPC world, but I’ll be sure to update when it does!

I finally got around to getting the new port multplier adapter, enclosure and drives added to my unRAID set.  Everything went pretty smooth except I had found that all of my TB drives were jumpered for 1.5Gbps operation (default on the Seagates and new Maxtor drives).  You’d think this would be a good find except that after removing the jumper, enabling them for 3Gbps operation, the server would hang during POST.  I tried countless times, but no luck – always with a 5B BIOS POST code, which is within the range assigned to the I/O buses.  5B is specifIc to ATA.  I’ll mess around with it some more later as all the 500GB drives I added hum right along at the 3Gbps setting.

I’m now trying to get everything rearranged to best utilize the new space while also cutting down on the need to move files down the road again.  I want to be able to just upgrade a 500GB and not have to do all this moving between disk shares again.

I’ve also started using a new Media Center plugin called Video Library+.  It’s an XML metadata-driven (from theTVDB.com and movie-xml.com) MCML-based plugin for Vista only that was designed with TV series in mind, but also does movies.  It requires some fairly specific naming conventions due to the ruby scraper embedded, but it’s not all that bad.  I had to rename most all of my TV episodes, breaking them in MyMovies, but I never used MM for that anyway.  If renaming episodes scares you, then check out EpNamer – it’s the greatest little application ever (for this purpose anyway).

I had some difficulties getting it to work with my movie collection and eventually gave up, but if you’re just starting out or have a small collection, it’s definitely worth a try.

Although DHL delivered to the wrong address, I received my new enclosure and PCIe card yesterday. DHL notified me via SMS that my package had been delivered at 4:30pm EST yesterday. However, upon arriving at 5:30 – nothing was there. Nothing at my in-law’s (one neighbor) and nothing on the doorstep at my other neighbor’s (DHL notes stated it was left at the front door and, as far as I knew, my neighbor was at work all day – so it should have been there). I called DHL and they said they would contact me within 2 hours. Not long afterwards, my wife asks me if I’m blind and tells me there’s a box on the front porch. I also noticed my neighbor was now home – coincedence? Nope.

Anyway, I unpacked and inspected everything and it all looks as expected – very nice construction and quality products from PC-Pitstop.  The enclosure is pretty much the same as my first 4-bay enclosure, except that it includes a 5-in-3 hotswap cage, as opposed to the 4-in-3.  Here a couple of shots of the enclosure:

The PCI-e card is pretty standard and smaller than I expected, but I can’t really say what I was expecting otherwise.  It’s an unboxed/unbranded item based on the Sil3132 chipset, which is required for operation with the Sil3726 port multiplier in the enclosure.

Other than that, PC-Pitstop did include an eSATA cable (3ft or 6ft…I haven’t really looked yet) which is nice and a standard power cable was also included.

I’ve been really busy the past few weeks so I’m hoping I can get this stuff going by the weekend.  Hopefully I’ll find a little time each day to complete a few of the tasks needed (I still need to take the drives out of my old server – blah).

More to come, so check back often!