[mythtv-users] recordings disappeared from list, still exist on disk

[Rod Smith]

On Thursday 05 November 2009 08:58:07 pm Marco Nelissen wrote:
> Just now I sat down to catch up on some TV watching, and to my
> surprise saw that most of my recordings had disappeared from the list.
> They were still there yesterday, but now they're gone. As far as I can
> tell, the recordings still exist on disk (at least some of them do).
> Anyone know what might have caused them to disappear from the
> recordings list, and if there's an easy way to get them to show up
> there again?

I realize you've already found your solution, but for the benefit of others 
(who may be reading this in the archives in the future), I've found two other 
situations that can cause similar problems:

- A full hard disk partition. Depending on the partition, different symptoms
  can result; but I've learned that the first thing to check when MythTV acts
  weirdly is free disk space. The most dangerous full-disk scenario is when
  the recordings disk fills with non-recording data (MythArchive log files,
  for instance -- I've now got those on their own dedicated partition), since
  MythTV will start deleting recordings when it runs low on disk space in
  the recordings directory.

- Database corruption. Running "mysqlcheck -r -umythtv -pyourpassword
  mythconverg" (changing "yourpassword" to your actual password, and "mythtv"
  to your MythTV SQL username, if necessary) should fix this problem. In
  fact, I've got that command set up in a daily cron job to help head off
  problems. As with full disks, symptoms can vary. I'm pretty sure I've seen
  the "missing recordings" you describe at least a couple of times and
  finding database corruption to be the cause.

Note that database corruption can result from a full database partition, so 
these two problems sometimes occur together.

-- 
Rod Smith