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[Ultraviolet13]

I've been using MC for a few years under versions 16 thru 19 on a Vista PC. I'd noticed that in MC18 & MC19, under the Playing Now libraries list, more than one Main Library would be listed, where only one should exist and was a genuine library. In MC version 19, this seems to have gotten worse and this weekend went into meltdown - to the point that none of the Main Libraries listed would work, even the real one. Also when you roll over the library you see the following:



I have since removed all versions of Media Center from my system, cleared the registry and deleted the mess that had been left in the C:\Users\Ian\AppData\Roaming




I then ran CHKDSK, to see if that could detect any problems but nothing showed up.

I've now tried a fresh install of MC 19.0.128 but started to see the same issues again.
I run two libraries, my original Main Library for MP3s and a FLAC library located on a NAS drive.

Anyone seen this sort of issue before and, if so what on earth is causing it?   ?

Any help / suggestions would be greatly appreciated.

Cheers,  Ian

[JimH]

That second picture suggests that there is or was a problem with the disk.  Something is very wrong at the OS level or with the hardware.  You may need to rebuild the machine.

[glynor]

Looks like something is terribly hosed in that filesystem.

[Ultraviolet13]

Thanks for the responses.

Could be right that a rebuild will be needed to sort this but I'm not currently in a position to do one on that PC.
I'm about to migrate everything to a newer PC, so perhaps I'll do it once that's been done.

The system above was rebuilt by Dell under warranty about three years back after a drive failure but is probably due for another one.

The C: drive is a partition on a striped pair of raided disks - I did wonder if that could be an issue? 
Another thought was that the Diskeeper software I run in the background to defrag the disks might be causing Media Center problems?

To be honest I'm not surprised the hardware has been blamed - software developers blame hardware (and hardware developers blame the software)
 

None of the reporting tools I have on the system show any problems with the file system or disks though, and none of the other software I run appears to have any issues. It just seems odd that only the Media Center software has problems and when removed I don't see any corruption in the Roaming Data directory.

I guess I'll have to live with it until I get the other PC fully up & running and MC fully migrated.

Cheers, Ian

[glynor]

The C: drive is a partition on a striped pair of raided disks - I did wonder if that could be an issue?

Dear lord, that certainly is a problem.

Running the OS disk on a striped RAID is a ticking time bomb. It is fine, so long as you have a rigorous backup system, and you plan for it to fail.  But to be clear, striped RAID sets more than double the chances that the volume will fail compared to a single disk.

But, there's all sorts of possible problems here.  When the machine came back from Dell, did it still have your data, or was it a clean install and you started over?

Restoring data from a failed disk could have left all sorts of corruption in its wake.
Of course, it could be signs of a new failure.  Or malware.  Or bad RAM. Or who knows what.

In any case, I wouldn't trust that disk.  That looks like stuff is seriously corrupted.

You could try the SFC /scannow, but if your RAID volume is failing, that could make it completely fail.  If the RAID is failing, any write could make the volume completely fail.

[glynor]

I'd add... If you want to fix it now, and I wouldn't wait, one option would be to buy a new SSD, large enough to replace that striped array.  One would assume the reason you have the striped array is for performance, and an SSD will massively outperform any RAIDed array, so you'll improve performance, and get rid of the danger.

Don't migrate the system to the new disk.  Install fresh (disconnect the current boot volumes entirely, and install Windows with only the new disk attached).  Then, copy your data over yourself.  An easy way to copy just your data over is via the Windows Easy Transfer utility.  It actually works pretty slickly.  Ask if you want more instructions on this.

[glynor]

To be honest I'm not surprised the hardware has been blamed - software developers blame hardware (and hardware developers blame the software)
 

None of the reporting tools I have on the system show any problems with the file system or disks though, and none of the other software I run appears to have any issues. It just seems odd that only the Media Center software has problems and when removed I don't see any corruption in the Roaming Data directory.

I don't think it is possible that MC could write all over the directory like that, without something else seriously going wrong on the system.

What reporting tools have you tried?  You mentioned chkdsk, which will only show inconsistencies in filesystem metadata, and says nothing about the underlying disk condition, or the condition of the files themselves on the disk.  And, it seemed like you deleted the directories where the corruption occurred before you did the chkdsk, which makes the reporting it provides of limited value (because it was obviously that metadata that was damaged, and files corrupted in the process).

I don't know if it is hardware.  It could be a whole variety of things, but I'm reasonably sure that MC couldn't do that "accidentally" (not without serious problems that would be likely to recur on many systems).  Hardware is probably a good guess, though, and it does sound like you're running in a pretty unsafe condition.

However, I'd take these steps:

0. Make a backup of C if you haven't.

1. Determine if disk failure is imminent.  This would mean performing read testing across the surface of your disks, not relying on SMART data, which may or may not be accurate or helpful (depending on the specific make/model of disks you have, really).  HD Tune can do an error scan.  Your RAID software might be able to do this too.

If you determine that one of your disks is failing, or your RAID manager shows drop outs, or anything else, then take action immediately.

2. Use the Windows system file checker.  If this fails, you have corrupt OS files.  SFC might be able to repair them, but if not, it usually points to deeper trouble.

3. Check RAM for failure with memtest86+.

4. Check thoroughly for malware.

5. If all of the above checks out, and you are using an unusual Security suite, or one of the more aggressive variety, remove it completely and try going with Windows Defender for a few days.  See if you can get the error to recur.

If all of that doesn't resolve the issue, then I'm low on ideas.  Other, more esoteric hardware failures could be involved, but normally one would turn up in those tests.  The last thing I'd probably do would be to do a solid CPU test like Prime95's Torture Test overnight.

[Ultraviolet13]

Dear lord, that certainly is a problem.

Running the OS disk on a striped RAID is a ticking time bomb. It is fine, so long as you have a rigorous backup system, and you plan for it to fail.  But to be clear, striped RAID sets more than double the chances that the volume will fail compared to a single disk.

But, there's all sorts of possible problems here.  When the machine came back from Dell, did it still have your data, or was it a clean install and you started over?

Restoring data from a failed disk could have left all sorts of corruption in its wake.
Of course, it could be signs of a new failure.  Or malware.  Or bad RAM. Or who knows what.

In any case, I wouldn't trust that disk.  That looks like stuff is seriously corrupted.

You could try the SFC /scannow, but if your RAID volume is failing, that could make it completely fail.  If the RAID is failing, any write could make the volume completely fail.

Hi,

the striped RAID is how DELL originally built the PC - for performance, as it was meant to be a 'gaming' system.
I had next business day cover on the PC, so when it was rebuilt under warranty DELL sent an engineer to my house with two new drives and we rebuilt it from scratch to a 'vanilla' state. I then reinstalled all my apps and recovered my data to the D: partition from backups - so it was a pretty clean rebuild.

I agree with you that striped RAID isn't ideal though and won't be going that route if I do go for a fresh build, and yes a SSD for the C: drive has got to be the best option. The other partition D: (also on the striped RAID) is about 1TB, so too big for SSD at present.

I don't know if RAID failure is imminent or not but I'd rather not provoke futher problems until I've migrated more fully to the new PC.
There are tests at startup that claim the RAID is OK and the Norton and Diskeeper tools don't report issues. 

Cheers,

Ian

[Ultraviolet13]

I don't think it is possible that MC could write all over the directory like that, without something else seriously going wrong on the system.

Interestingly I tried to move my two MC libraries to the new PC today using MC's own library backups to maintain play counts, histories and settings within MC. The main library music files themselves have been copied to the new PC prior to this (keeping the same path structure) and the FLAC library files are stored on a NAS system.

So, starting from a new install of MC under Windows 8.1, I copied over the last two library backups I did on the old PC - 1 for FLAC Library and one for Main Library - across to the new PC and tired restores from within the new MC install. I did the FLAC library first and that appeared to work OK. Closed and reopened MC and all looked good. I then restored the Main Library - which caused MC to restart automatically to 'apply library settings' - I then ended up seeing two 'Main Library' listings and one of them had a corrupted location (not as extreme as shown above but still screwed up).

I have now reinstalled MC again on the new PC, restored the FLAC library from the old PC's MC backup but just imported all of the Main Library files into MC from disk, so lost all the history. This appears to be working fine now. Makes me wonder if there isn't an issue with my MC Main Library that is purely down to a corruption in the MC backup data.

I'm tempted to do the same on the old PC now...