All tuners Gone After Power Went Out - How to recover Guide

[MCE0508]

I have been using EPG123 for 2.5 years and it has worked great. It is much better than Microsoft Guide. I have been using version 1.17 because it worked fine for me. I believe in the theory that if it is not broken, don't fix it.

I went away for a few days for Thanksgiving and came home to my mediacenter guide completely missing. The power had gone out while I was gone and I am guessing something in my ehome directory was corrupted. As I looked into it, all of the tuners were gone. I have a Ceton Infinitv PCIe and 2 Hauppauge 2250s. The Ceton is used to record Cable TV and the Hauppauge is used for ATSC. I tried to run "Live TV setup" in Media Center, but at the end it gave me an error that said something like "TV setup has encountered a serious problem".

I tried to do a Windows system restore hoping that it would restore my files, but unfortunately System restore was turned off, so that is not an option.

To get the Mediacenter up and running, i put a year old hard drive image back on the PC. Everything works again, but any TV show that I recorded on cable (copy protected) will not play with the old image installed. This proves that the hardware is fine, it is a Windows issue.

I put the current image with no guide back on the PC, and I could watch the recorded copy protected TV shows. I used the EPG123 Client (v1.17) and did a Clean Install. The clean install allowed the Live TV setup to complete successfully. I then used the the EPG123 Client to match the channels to the Guide. But, I don't have my favorite channel lineup or any of my Scheduled Recording listings.

I then imaged the hard drive again and went thought the above process again, but this time I used EPG123 version 1.30. I simply copied the 1.30 files into the EPG123 directory. This issue I have with going from 1.17 to 1.30 is that I lose my customized TV listings (Since I have cable, there are like 500 channels, but I only select 100 of them to be downloaded, and I don't download the rest. I do this so when I do a channel match in EPG123 Client, I only get the channels I want) When I open EPG123 1.17, all of my TV listings are there and the ones I want are checked, but when I open 1.30 and login into Schedules Direct, I get all of my listings back, but none of them are selected. Unless there is a better way, I will need to manually check each station I want to download.

I tried to use the recordings transfer tool, but when I went into the EPG123 folder and I looked for a backup, the only backup I found was from 2017. I don't have any recent backups. It also looks like version 1.17 doesn't allow you to do a manual backup, but version 1.30 does.

I am currently running the 2018 Windows image with 1.17. I did install 1.30, then opened EPG123 Client and did a manual backup, and then went back to 1.17 so that my customized Channels listings would stay intake.

My questions are:

1. Is there another way to get my Tuners back without having to do a Clean Install in EPG123 Client? Maybe grab files from my 2018 image and put them into my current Windows?

2. If the answer to question 1 is no, is there a way to get my favorite listings and scheduled recordings back after I do a clean install? The Favorite channels is a pain beause I have to do everything through the Media Center interface, which takes time. The Schedule Recordings is a pain because about half of my shows won't be on in the next 3 weeks, so i can't use the guide to schedule them to record. So I run the risk of missing recordings because i have to remember sometime in the future to set them to record, unless there is a better way.

3. Is there a way to go from EPG123 1.17 to 1.30 and keep my customized selected channel listings in EPG123?

Thanks in advance for your help.

[garyan2]

Hopefully I have followed everything correctly.

For starters, updating from 1.1.17 to 1.3.0 should not affect your channel selections to download. How and where did you install v1.3.0? If your epg123 installation is in a Program Files folder, then you will have to copy the epg123.cfg file over to c:\programdata\garyan2\epg123\epg123.cfg.

The recordings transfer tool will work with the backup you made with v1.3.0.

If you want to try things again, and if I understand what you have, try
1) use image with broken guide
2) install epg123 v1.3.0 (note above if you need to copy epg123.cfg to a new location)
3) perform a Client Setup (this will automatically create a backup and will be available for the transfer tool to restore your recordings)

You will lose you "Favorite" lineup(s) this way, but you should be back in business without any problems. Also, you will get to enjoy all the new features since v1.1.17.

[MCE0508]

Thanks for the information. I most likely won't be able to work on this until Saturday.

My installation of 1.17 is in the Program Files folder. I downloaded the portable version of 1.30 and copied the files into the 1.17 folder. I definitely didn't move the *.cfg file to the programdata folder, so hopefully that fixes the tv listings issue.