thursday 8:20 BIG Emergency

[Beavis]

when you rebuild your database and have to select a drive.

[Beavis]

what version are you running ?

[Bi-Polar Bear]

Originally Posted by Beavis

when you rebuild your database and have to select a drive.

wait a minute... do I have to rebuild the database for each drive even though they're named identically and the files are identical?

[Beavis]

you shouldnt have to.

what version of hoster do you have ???

[Bi-Polar Bear]

3.13

[Beavis]

man i would upgrade.

is the hard drives the same make and model ?

[Bi-Polar Bear]

same manufacturer... beyond micro... one is a 500 the new one is one of those terrabyte drives that has two 500's in one case that are connected and function as one....

[ddouglass]

I don't believe you can swap out drives like that and have Hoster think the second drive is the same as the first. The letter assigned to a drive is really for "Human" convienence. The computer recognizes the drive by a unique ID hard coded to the drive controller on each drive. This is how the computer and the drives communicate and not by drive letter. Since those IDs would not be the same for the two drives, then Hoster (Windows) will not recognize the files are there without rebuilding the database.
This is why a lot of people carry back-up laptop computers rather than just a drive.
So yes for your current set-up you will need to rebuild the database each time you change drives.

[Bi-Polar Bear]

that seems incredibly impractical since it takes 55 minutes to rebuild the database.

When I first started I had my files on two different hard drives and the hoster program read them both with no problem. On the gig someone knocked my hard drive over and broke it and that's why I just made this new back up drive.

It read 2 different drives before interchangably with no problem so doesn't that follow that it must be something else?

[swany]

BiPolar, I had a few issues with having 14,000 plus songs and have culled that to under 8,000. Changed my books to reflect less than 4,000 I'm finding my gigs are having a lot more singing and a lot less paging through the books. It took me several days with my rig set up in the garage to cull a pile of dupes and get rid of the songs no one ever sings. I checked for just one Bing Crosby - White Christmas and had 9 dupes!!!!!!!!!!! Point I'm trying to make is make up a hoster lite file out of your kma files and if this ever happens again rebuild from there. If you keep track of what your singers are singing it makes it easier, to do the culling.

On the plus side my books are a lot easier to read larger font, less pages and one inch binders.

Big plus when we had the Vista 3.318-9 fiasco, I got hit with that lucky I was carrying my extra laptop. Next day reloaded songs and rebuilt database in less than a half hour. If I had my USB hard drive with me it would have taken less than 10 minutes. Sometimes less is more, in most of our cases we have never had a gig that need 200 different songs in a night average. I move them pretty fast at one of mine and can't touch that figure. PCs have glitches

MTU prgs are built better than the operating systems we put them in, sad but true.

[ddouglass]

Originally Posted by Bi-Polar Bear

that seems incredibly impractical since it takes 55 minutes to rebuild the database.

When I first started I had my files on two different hard drives and the hoster program read them both with no problem. On the gig someone knocked my hard drive over and broke it and that's why I just made this new back up drive.

It read 2 different drives before interchangably with no problem so doesn't that follow that it must be something else?

The problem isn't Hoster. The problem would be in Microsoft Windows. As Beavis said before one or both of those drives are probably set-up as "Dynamic" instead of "Basic". My guess would be it is the dual 500Gb drives setup as one drive and if you were to reformat it with correct partition to make it work you would lose the second drive addition.
If you had two single 500Gb drives and both set-up with a basic partition then that would work.

[Beavis]

if you use the hoster song book and use the song book ID theres no paging through anything, just type the number in and the song pops up.

[gd123]

As I understand it, you had 2 External HDs with KMAs and one was designated as a BACKUP Drive.

One Ext HD failed, so you had to replace it and COPY the files from the ONLY GOOD External HD to the NEW External HD.

Now, it is possible that, upon connecting the NEW Drive to your computer for the first time, your computer assigned drive letter "X."

Then, possibly, you changed the DRIVE LETTER to "F," in keeping with the way your Drives were assigned prior to the one Failure.

Drive letter of "F" assigned to each individual drive works fine only when ONE drive is connected to your computer at any given time.

Now, when you talk about copying files from ONE Ext HD to the Other, you would have had the TWO DRIVES connected to your computer at the SAME TIME.
It is not possible to have the SAME Drive letter assigned as "F" at this point.

So, I suspect that, when both drives were connected at the same time, YOUR OS assigned a Different DRIVE LETTER to the drive that you thought was "F."

This is the “ONLY” reason way HOSTER would not be finding the KMAs on that DRIVE.

[Bi-Polar Bear]

Originally Posted by gd123

As I understand it, you had 2 External HDs with KMAs and one was designated as a BACKUP Drive.

One Ext HD failed, so you had to replace it and COPY the files from the ONLY GOOD External HD to the NEW External HD.

Now, it is possible that, upon connecting the NEW Drive to your computer for the first time, your computer assigned drive letter "X."

Then, possibly, you changed the DRIVE LETTER to "F," in keeping with the way your Drives were assigned prior to the one Failure.

Drive letter of "F" assigned to each individual drive works fine only when ONE drive is connected to your computer at any given time.

Now, when you talk about copying files from ONE Ext HD to the Other, you would have had the TWO DRIVES connected to your computer at the SAME TIME.
It is not possible to have the SAME Drive letter assigned as "F" at this point.

So, I suspect that, when both drives were connected at the same time, YOUR OS assigned a Different DRIVE LETTER to the drive that you thought was "F."

This is the “ONLY” reason way HOSTER would not be finding the KMAs on that DRIVE.

I'm afraid not.... I copied from one hdd to another.... then disconnected both, restarted the machine, plugged in the new ext drive only, assigned it the identical drive letter f. My computer recognizes the drive, the letter and all the files. Hoster will not recognize it. It will recognize the original.

[admin]

Originally Posted by ddouglass

The problem isn't Hoster. The problem would be in Microsoft Windows. As Beavis said before one or both of those drives are probably set-up as "Dynamic" instead of "Basic". My guess would be it is the dual 500Gb drives setup as one drive and if you were to reformat it with correct partition to make it work you would lose the second drive addition.
If you had two single 500Gb drives and both set-up with a basic partition then that would work.

First, thank you for revealing that your drive that Hoster/Windows won't recognize is a 2-drive system. That was excellent fact reporting that is refreshing to see... as we all scratch our heads to help you with you special problem.

I concur with Dale on this point. You have two dissimilar drives... as far as Windows is concerned:

1. A single drive with simple logic within it.

2. A dual-drive mirrored "system".

MTU does NOT access drives. We go through the Windows OS to access them. If Hoster is not able to access your mirrored drive, there is something Windows is doing that is hiding it from Hoster, or changing the "path" just enough that the full path stored in the Build Songs Database list window is no longer identical.

You need to get two plain drives and forget the mirroring or whatever that 2-drive system is doing to look like 1TB.

We have thousands of users with multiple drives, many who swap without problems. Hoster doesn't have a problem with "regular" drives. I can't 100% state this is the cause, but I'm 99.9% sure because I know Hoster can do exactly what you want to do.

[Bi-Polar Bear]

thanks for your help. I'll check into that. Unfortunately I can't return the drive.... but perhaps I can get windows to do something with it.

[Beavis]

i simple 500gb drive is available at BB for under $100

[Bi-Polar Bear]

yeah I know... but I've bought a terrabyte and a 500 gig in the last 2 weeks... I need to lay low... mortgage, child support, you know, that dumb stuff

[billyo]

i have 2 laptops ( 1 main and 1 back-up ) and have 2 hhd's on each one i havent had any problems swapping hhd's and only one time had a problem rebuilding/ merging my song database..when rebuilding ,i searched for a song and i get an error msg. " not in database" (i know i have 3 of the same song ) but when i merge ,all of the 3 songs would come up..

[slsides]

for what it's worth, i can confirm that the db in c:/mtu/hoster can read kma off of multiple external drives all set up the same and assigned to the same drive letter without rebuilding the db. it was one of the things i had to make sure was set up right for the machine i've been working on.