My current hard disk is about 7 years old. I was watching a movie last night and about halfway through the movie, the playback froze with the disk activity LED glowing solid. I had to do a hard reset to get the PC going again. I then ran a "chkdsk" and it reported 342 bad sectors and mapped them out. I ran into this same problem about 6 months, ran a "chkdsk" and it also reported some bad sectors and mapped them out. So, in short, I think I have a disk drive on the verge of failure and it needs to be replaced.
I have a new identical Western Digital Blue 2 TB disk drive ready to go. My HTPC is 16 years old so I have replaced the drive once and used Windows system restore from an image to restore the drive. This time I have 2 options. I have a device that can do a disk clone between the old and the new drive without involving Windows system restore. Or I can use Windows system restore as before. I prefer to use the disk clone hardware if I can because this will also copy all of my recorded TV programs. I would have to do this separately if I use Windows system restore because Windows image backup does not save the recorded TV programs.
My question is this. Can I safely use the disk cloning hardware to build the new drive? Will this cause any DRM problems? Or do I have to use Windows system restore as before?
Backup versus cloning
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DSperber
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Might as well "clone" the entire physical drive in one process presumably controlled by a hardware device, rather than get involved yourself doing the same thing but in two separate steps.
In either case, you will not have any DRM issues just because you're putting everything on a new disk. The is not pertinent to WMC and PlayReady and DRM.
More concerning however is whether or not it might be too late to do a 100% successful copy. With hundreds of reported disk errors your "cloning device" may not be able to cope. It may have some sort of built-in error retry/recovery, but if the disk error is simply unrecoverable then there's no way to recover. That data is now lost, and whatever was on that sector is lost.
So it the lost data was just some internal portion of the media file then playing it back will likely experience a hiccup or worse. But if the lost data happened to be in the "file system", then you may actually lose that entire media file from your set of recordings when you do finally come back up on the cloned Windows system.
Now on the other hand...
I recently had the same type of experience with my own separate 5-year old internal 6TB WD Black physical drive that I use as my primary WMC recording storage. As with your experience, my playback was getting more and more erratic and intermittent, occasionally causing me to have to re-boot, etc. I finally ran my own "surface test" (using MiniTool Partition Wizard) and learned the bad news. I'd gotten 5 years of reliable use, but it had finally reached obvious end-of-life.
I tried to do a "file-by-file copy" of all folders/files on the dying drive over to a brand new replacement (through an external SATA adapter),using a software product named Beyond Compare. This isn't a hardware or device-level copy. It is simply a super-Explorer type of folder/file "data" copy. It has the advantage (if you call it that) of using Windows and driver-level error recovery, and if that fails then the problematic file just gets bypassed. It doesn't prevent the rest of the folders/files from being copied (if they can be copied), so minimal harm is done in that just one "dead" file at a time gets lost. And you know which ones they are.
Sometimes rebooting the machine and re-running Beyond Compare pointing once again to those files that were fatal problems which could not be read successfully (and thus bypassed) may well be able to be copied this second time. It's unpredictable, but often happens. Something about the reboot and whatever is going on at the drive level when copying specific files a second time may just be different than it was the first time, and miraculously the second copy works! Or maybe the third or fourth try is needed, and eventually it works. Or not, and it's just lost.
Anyway I prefer this logical file-by-file approach to copying the "recordings" and other folders (as opposed to physically copying the entire drive) specifically because a dying drive is dying, and will likely cause problems durng the copy process. Better to know what you need to re-try than not, and that will only be done when copying a file at a time. At least you know that a file WAS successfully copied OR NOT, and you know its name.
Just my opinion. In the end I did end up losing perhaps 15 recordings files out of about 800, because of unrecoverable I/O errors, even after several retries. Not the end of the world.
In either case, you will not have any DRM issues just because you're putting everything on a new disk. The is not pertinent to WMC and PlayReady and DRM.
More concerning however is whether or not it might be too late to do a 100% successful copy. With hundreds of reported disk errors your "cloning device" may not be able to cope. It may have some sort of built-in error retry/recovery, but if the disk error is simply unrecoverable then there's no way to recover. That data is now lost, and whatever was on that sector is lost.
So it the lost data was just some internal portion of the media file then playing it back will likely experience a hiccup or worse. But if the lost data happened to be in the "file system", then you may actually lose that entire media file from your set of recordings when you do finally come back up on the cloned Windows system.
Now on the other hand...
I recently had the same type of experience with my own separate 5-year old internal 6TB WD Black physical drive that I use as my primary WMC recording storage. As with your experience, my playback was getting more and more erratic and intermittent, occasionally causing me to have to re-boot, etc. I finally ran my own "surface test" (using MiniTool Partition Wizard) and learned the bad news. I'd gotten 5 years of reliable use, but it had finally reached obvious end-of-life.
I tried to do a "file-by-file copy" of all folders/files on the dying drive over to a brand new replacement (through an external SATA adapter),using a software product named Beyond Compare. This isn't a hardware or device-level copy. It is simply a super-Explorer type of folder/file "data" copy. It has the advantage (if you call it that) of using Windows and driver-level error recovery, and if that fails then the problematic file just gets bypassed. It doesn't prevent the rest of the folders/files from being copied (if they can be copied), so minimal harm is done in that just one "dead" file at a time gets lost. And you know which ones they are.
Sometimes rebooting the machine and re-running Beyond Compare pointing once again to those files that were fatal problems which could not be read successfully (and thus bypassed) may well be able to be copied this second time. It's unpredictable, but often happens. Something about the reboot and whatever is going on at the drive level when copying specific files a second time may just be different than it was the first time, and miraculously the second copy works! Or maybe the third or fourth try is needed, and eventually it works. Or not, and it's just lost.
Anyway I prefer this logical file-by-file approach to copying the "recordings" and other folders (as opposed to physically copying the entire drive) specifically because a dying drive is dying, and will likely cause problems durng the copy process. Better to know what you need to re-try than not, and that will only be done when copying a file at a time. At least you know that a file WAS successfully copied OR NOT, and you know its name.
Just my opinion. In the end I did end up losing perhaps 15 recordings files out of about 800, because of unrecoverable I/O errors, even after several retries. Not the end of the world.
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MRMILSTAR
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Thanks. I will try the disk clone tomorrow. I just did a chkdsk and it made its corrections so hopefully no new bad clusters developed in 2 days. If the clone isn't successful, I'll just do it the way that I did previously using Windows System Restore followed up by manual transfer of TV program files.
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Space
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I believe changing hard drives IS pertinent to PlayReady DRM. You can usually change the HD multiple times without it affecting DRM, but it is a component that contributes to the DRM signature.DSperber wrote: ↑Tue Sep 24, 2024 11:39 pm Might as well "clone" the entire physical drive in one process presumably controlled by a hardware device, rather than get involved yourself doing the same thing but in two separate steps.
In either case, you will not have any DRM issues just because you're putting everything on a new disk. The is not pertinent to WMC and PlayReady and DRM.
...
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MRMILSTAR
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I thought that as long as the replacement disk drive was the same size, this wouldn't be a problem because DRM and PlayReady would recognize that this was the same PC.
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Space
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Perhaps, all I know is that changing the disk drive can trigger a new DRM signature, I'm not sure what attribute of the disk drive is involved, serial number, size, etc. Perhaps you are correct, if it only uses disk size and you get the exact same disk, it might not affect DRM at all. But I do know that if PlayReady sees that you have a new drive (by whatever criteria it uses to do so), it will affect DRM, and if you keep changing the drive several times (perhaps in combination with having changed other hardware in the past) it could put you over the limit and require a new signature to be generated (a new signature would mean that your computer is seen as a different machine for purposes of DRM).
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MRMILSTAR
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Here are my results. Cloning didn't work even with identical Western Digital 2 TB disk drives. With the cloned drive, whenever I tried to watch a live DRM-protected program on the guide it stated "The video playback device does not support playback of protected content." At another time WMC also attempted to access the PlayReady server presumably to obtain a new key. Since I knew that server was shut down by Microsoft I knew that was a dead end. I finally achieved success by doing a Windows system image restore from an external hard drive to the new disk drive. I can now watch and record DRM-protected content from the guide. Of coarse I lost all my previously recorded programs but I had saved them elsewhere beforehand. I copied the non-DRM programs back and they are now viewable. My only loss was that I couldn't watch any DRM-protected programs that I had previously recorded. This my third disk drive in 16 years. By the time I have to do this again the entire system will probably be unusable due to Microsoft shutting down and deprecating things.
As an aside, I had added a new video card several months earlier without even thinking about possible PlayReady ramifications at the time. Afterwards, the HTPC worked normally. Apparently PlayReady doesn't trigger on a new video card.
As an aside, I had added a new video card several months earlier without even thinking about possible PlayReady ramifications at the time. Afterwards, the HTPC worked normally. Apparently PlayReady doesn't trigger on a new video card.
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DSperber
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I am honestly quite surprised at your results. It is very different from my own recent results to a similar issue.
As I mentioned in my earlier post, I recently had to replace the failing WD 6TB drive on which my "\Recorded TV" folder lives (along with lots of other folders). The recordings folder takes up about 4TB of the 6TB, and at this moment there are 785 files in it. My Media Center library also has a second 2TB folder on a second drive, which currently has about 400 files in it. Mixture of both DRM recordings from Spectrum cable (via Ceton 6-tuner PCIe card), as well as non-DRM OTA recordings from my roof antenna (via Hauppauge 4-tuner Quad-HD PCIe card).
My story is exactly as I related it. I purchased a new identical WD 6TB drive (actually, it was a newer model of the original drive and did have one digit difference in the internal product code, but otherwise identical in brand and size). And then I did a folder/FILE-by-FILE copy (one file at a time) using the Beyond Compare program. This is really just like Windows File Explorer, but more powerful and designed to compare folders/files as well as file contents. So really it's just an automated way to copy all my nearly 800 recordings from the failing drive over to the newly present replacement drive, temporarily while both drives were physically available to Windows. Once the copy process completed I removed the defective old internal drive and replaced it with the new drive (that was now completely populated with as many folders/files as could be successfully copied).
As I mentioned, I did lose a small handful of files in the one-by-one copy process done by Beyond Compare, even after trying several times (each one after either a simple retry, or in worst case after a machine reboot, which sometimes results in a now successful I/O error recovery which had previously failed).
Again: (a) I DID NOT DO A CLONE OF THE ENTIRE DRIVE, and (b) I DID NOT DO A RESTORE OF A MACRIUM REFLECT "SYSTEM IMAGE" BACKUP, and (c) I DID NOT DO A RESTORE OF A "SYSTEM IMAGE: BACKUP DONE THROUGH WINDOWS (since I don't use Windows for my "system image" backups, because I use Macrium Reflect which is 1000 times more useful).
==> I did a FILE-BY-FILE copy, from the dying drive to the new drive while both were attached. And then swapped out the old dead drive, replacing it internally in my machine with the new replacement.
AND I DID NOT LOSE ANY DRM CONTENT!!! Zero PlayReady issues. Absolutely 100% transparent and successful. The replacement physical drive did not make WMC unhappy. I still have 100% access to successful non-problematic playback of all DRM cable recordings.
I don't know why you had the DRM problems you describe. If you'd like to just try it again, duplicating my approach by using Explorer (or Beyond Compare or any Explorer-like product) to manually copy the files from the old drive to the new drive, it seems to be worth at least a shot... assuming you're not happy to have lost your DRM recordings.
Over my own probably 15 years of WMC use I have on at least several occasions upgraded my internal drives when I ran out of room, or simply wanted to increase my storage capacity in "\Recorded TV" (either for the one primary new-recordings storage, or additional secondary "read-only" recordings storage in the library). I have NEVER had any issues with PlayReady deciding that my enlarged or additional recording storage implied "new machine" such that DRM content was lost. Never happened.
(NOTE: I have also replaced graphics cards and monitors without any impact on the ability for WMC to play DRM recordings. The only time I ever got into a DRM-unhappy situation was when I tried to add 16GB of memory to my machine, bringing it from 16GB to 32GB. I had read this was "allowed", but my experience is that it is not. As soon as I came back up I was no longer allowed to play my DRM recordings. I had to remove the new 16GB and revert back to just the original 16GB, and instantly DRM playback returned.)
As I mentioned in my earlier post, I recently had to replace the failing WD 6TB drive on which my "\Recorded TV" folder lives (along with lots of other folders). The recordings folder takes up about 4TB of the 6TB, and at this moment there are 785 files in it. My Media Center library also has a second 2TB folder on a second drive, which currently has about 400 files in it. Mixture of both DRM recordings from Spectrum cable (via Ceton 6-tuner PCIe card), as well as non-DRM OTA recordings from my roof antenna (via Hauppauge 4-tuner Quad-HD PCIe card).
My story is exactly as I related it. I purchased a new identical WD 6TB drive (actually, it was a newer model of the original drive and did have one digit difference in the internal product code, but otherwise identical in brand and size). And then I did a folder/FILE-by-FILE copy (one file at a time) using the Beyond Compare program. This is really just like Windows File Explorer, but more powerful and designed to compare folders/files as well as file contents. So really it's just an automated way to copy all my nearly 800 recordings from the failing drive over to the newly present replacement drive, temporarily while both drives were physically available to Windows. Once the copy process completed I removed the defective old internal drive and replaced it with the new drive (that was now completely populated with as many folders/files as could be successfully copied).
As I mentioned, I did lose a small handful of files in the one-by-one copy process done by Beyond Compare, even after trying several times (each one after either a simple retry, or in worst case after a machine reboot, which sometimes results in a now successful I/O error recovery which had previously failed).
Again: (a) I DID NOT DO A CLONE OF THE ENTIRE DRIVE, and (b) I DID NOT DO A RESTORE OF A MACRIUM REFLECT "SYSTEM IMAGE" BACKUP, and (c) I DID NOT DO A RESTORE OF A "SYSTEM IMAGE: BACKUP DONE THROUGH WINDOWS (since I don't use Windows for my "system image" backups, because I use Macrium Reflect which is 1000 times more useful).
==> I did a FILE-BY-FILE copy, from the dying drive to the new drive while both were attached. And then swapped out the old dead drive, replacing it internally in my machine with the new replacement.
AND I DID NOT LOSE ANY DRM CONTENT!!! Zero PlayReady issues. Absolutely 100% transparent and successful. The replacement physical drive did not make WMC unhappy. I still have 100% access to successful non-problematic playback of all DRM cable recordings.
I don't know why you had the DRM problems you describe. If you'd like to just try it again, duplicating my approach by using Explorer (or Beyond Compare or any Explorer-like product) to manually copy the files from the old drive to the new drive, it seems to be worth at least a shot... assuming you're not happy to have lost your DRM recordings.
Over my own probably 15 years of WMC use I have on at least several occasions upgraded my internal drives when I ran out of room, or simply wanted to increase my storage capacity in "\Recorded TV" (either for the one primary new-recordings storage, or additional secondary "read-only" recordings storage in the library). I have NEVER had any issues with PlayReady deciding that my enlarged or additional recording storage implied "new machine" such that DRM content was lost. Never happened.
(NOTE: I have also replaced graphics cards and monitors without any impact on the ability for WMC to play DRM recordings. The only time I ever got into a DRM-unhappy situation was when I tried to add 16GB of memory to my machine, bringing it from 16GB to 32GB. I had read this was "allowed", but my experience is that it is not. As soon as I came back up I was no longer allowed to play my DRM recordings. I had to remove the new 16GB and revert back to just the original 16GB, and instantly DRM playback returned.)
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MRMILSTAR
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If I'm interpreting your response correctly, you have a separate disk drive for your recordings that is separate from the Windows/WMC disk drive. I only have a single disk drive that contains everything. Maybe that is the difference and PlayReady lets you get away with a separate drive for the recordings after replacement. I don't know. I'm just speculating. Does anyone know what PlayReady actually looks at in terms of HW?
In any case I'm satisfied with where I am. I only lost about 10 DRM programs. Nothing I can't record again.
In any case I'm satisfied with where I am. I only lost about 10 DRM programs. Nothing I can't record again.
Last edited by MRMILSTAR on Sat Sep 28, 2024 8:10 pm, edited 1 time in total.
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DSperber
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AHA! Yes, you are correct.
I have multiple internal drives inside my machine, and have a "small" C-partition for Windows on one of them. I have established a personal style with my many machines over my many years, not to have everything in a "giant C". I buy or build machines with multiple physical drives, for many reasons. In general I put "data" off of the C-partition, and if possible even off of that physical drive that contains C. Lessons learned from unfortunate experiences over the year.
And I use Macrium Reflect rather than Windows, as my tool to take backups of both Windows C, as well as occasional other non-C partitions or drives (e.g. for when replacing a complete physical drive with a new/larger one. But ordinarily I use "folder/file DATA" backups for everything that is not Windows system on C. I find it far more convenient to selectively recover lost or damaged or corrupt individual folders/files from a "folder/file" backup, rather than trying to deal with a complete 'system image" of a partition or drive in order to recover individual items.
And you are absolutely right. That could absolutely well be why I have never had a problem upgrading/enlarging/resizing/replacing drives or partitions over the years, as it relates to DRM. I am never fooling with C and Windows itself. It's always non-C.
My primary "\Recorded TV" is on E, and my secondary "read-only" recordings are on M.
NOTE: just noticed I mistakenly said that my recently replaced drive was 6TB. Turns out it was 4TB. I have two 4TB drives and a 6TB drive, all of which are WD Black SATA3 HDD spinners, in addition to my small 256GB NVMe M.2 SSD on which my Windows C partition lives.
I have multiple internal drives inside my machine, and have a "small" C-partition for Windows on one of them. I have established a personal style with my many machines over my many years, not to have everything in a "giant C". I buy or build machines with multiple physical drives, for many reasons. In general I put "data" off of the C-partition, and if possible even off of that physical drive that contains C. Lessons learned from unfortunate experiences over the year.
And I use Macrium Reflect rather than Windows, as my tool to take backups of both Windows C, as well as occasional other non-C partitions or drives (e.g. for when replacing a complete physical drive with a new/larger one. But ordinarily I use "folder/file DATA" backups for everything that is not Windows system on C. I find it far more convenient to selectively recover lost or damaged or corrupt individual folders/files from a "folder/file" backup, rather than trying to deal with a complete 'system image" of a partition or drive in order to recover individual items.
And you are absolutely right. That could absolutely well be why I have never had a problem upgrading/enlarging/resizing/replacing drives or partitions over the years, as it relates to DRM. I am never fooling with C and Windows itself. It's always non-C.
My primary "\Recorded TV" is on E, and my secondary "read-only" recordings are on M.
NOTE: just noticed I mistakenly said that my recently replaced drive was 6TB. Turns out it was 4TB. I have two 4TB drives and a 6TB drive, all of which are WD Black SATA3 HDD spinners, in addition to my small 256GB NVMe M.2 SSD on which my Windows C partition lives.
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Space
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I also have a partition for the C: (system) drive on a 4TB drive and then a separate partition for the video file storage (on my HTPC which died a while ago, but hopefully can be resurrected when I have time to look at it further). The C: partition is 80GB and the rest is a partition for the video storage.
I used Macrium Reflect to back up the system partitions (C: drive and supporting partitions), but do not back up the video partition. This means small backups but I loose all the video if I have an unrecoverable hard crash.
I've had the drive start to fail in the past and was able clone/restore the C: partition to a new drive and then just copied over all the video files. DRM was fine and I could play back all old DRM files. I think I have done this more than once and the drives were not the same type or size (but I think were the same brand).
I don't think anyone knows all the things that are looked at when creating the PlayReady signature for a machine. That's something that would have to be reverse engineered, I'm guessing. It's been kept a secret, for obvious reasons.
I used Macrium Reflect to back up the system partitions (C: drive and supporting partitions), but do not back up the video partition. This means small backups but I loose all the video if I have an unrecoverable hard crash.
I've had the drive start to fail in the past and was able clone/restore the C: partition to a new drive and then just copied over all the video files. DRM was fine and I could play back all old DRM files. I think I have done this more than once and the drives were not the same type or size (but I think were the same brand).
I don't think anyone knows all the things that are looked at when creating the PlayReady signature for a machine. That's something that would have to be reverse engineered, I'm guessing. It's been kept a secret, for obvious reasons.