Media Center – Near Death Experience

Sunday, December 14th, 2008

I have an older WindowsXP based Media Center pc made by HP. It is the model z545. This is a discontinued unit which is too bad. I liked how the black case fits right in with your entertainment gear.

z545 Media Center

Last night my wife says the remote control quit working. This happens now and then, but a simple reboot usually fixes it right up. This unit is connected to dual Directv receivers. I found to my dismay when the system rebooted it claimed something was corrupt and could not see any tuners. Spending my weekend rebuilding the OS was not something I looked forward to.

After some poking around here is what I did to fix it. Otherwise it was time to look into a Mac Mini as a media center. I just liked having my xbox360 be able to pull tv from the directv over my network.

  • The media center stays powered on all the time. So it can record shows at any time, keep the guide updated etc. So I turned it off and unplugged it. Charge can build up in hardware. Since things were working and suddenly quit this was the most likely main issue.
  • I found I still had two older movie programs installed. Cinemanow and Movielink. Cinemanow tends to update itself every now and then. It was one thing acting odd and we don’t really use them. So mark these for uninstall.
  • Since I was getting messages about corruption and suspect Cinemanow did something I rediscovered System Restore Point. This is something I have always ignored.
  • So after the full power off and leaving unplugged to discharge for 15 minutes I restored to a system point from last month. Then I uninstalled the unnecessary extra media software that might try and update components in the future. Rebooted and everything was working again. Both the unseen hardware components and software component corruption was all fixed up.

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    Posted in George Starcher | View Comments

    Recover Files from CD’s

    Monday, January 28th, 2008

    Today I ran into a problem trying to make copies of a CD full of documents. The copy process in Nero threw me a number of unreadable errors, even trying to copy each folder at a time put me headfirst into a cyclic redundancy check error, which told me all I needed to know about the state of the physical media. Of course, just saying “Sorry it’s not readable” without trying something wasn’t an option, so off to Google I went.

    I found a little utility called Recovery Toolbox for CD Free. Once installed, I launched it and had it copy off all the data from the CD. It took a little while, and made some odd noises in the CD drive when it hit the files that resided on the bad sectors of the CD, but it did recovery everything off the CD, which then allowed me to go ahead and make a copy of copies of it.

    Can’t complain about a tool that does the job!

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    Posted in FiT Tips, Mike McBride | View Comments