Expert mysteries

[jhld]

I back up all of my shows on memory sticks. My problem is about saving to the hard drive.

Unless the save-directory can be changed from the console ( which I don't believe it can ) in an acidental way,then no.

As a Mac person, I am too cautious to make any changes directly in the Windows environment. My IT guy did a search for the missing show files on the C drive, which found none of the missing shows.

[niclights]

Ok. I think I know what is going on here.

I believe it is related to this from the v2 release notes:

Loading a 2008/ Tiger Show into an Expert: The Expert can now load and save shows from both the Pearl 2008 and the Pearl Tiger consoles. This means that when saving a show to the USB stick on a Pearl 2008 console you can take that stick and directly load it into an Expert console. It is also possible to take an Expert USB Show stick and load the expert shows into the Pearl 2008

Looking at some Tiger saves on a USB flash here the structure is as follows:

Avolites/Pearlexp/Shows/PEXPxxxx/ (where xxxx is a number).

Then inside each PEXP directory will be the standard two .sys files along with an XML file which contains the files actual name shown in the console (previously the directory name) and time/date information.

I must admit I have not had time to install the official v2 release and so do not know what, if any, of these changes were made to the HDD structure. But I had heard of another user experiencing the same problem after updating.

Does this shed some light?

Hopefully Olie will be able to give more help (and/or correction!)

[Gregory]

Hi,

The old Expert software stored shows in the following location on the hard drive:
C:\Program Files\Avolites\PearlExpert\Shows\[Show name]\[Date]\

The version 2 software will load shows from the previous locations but only save to the new location:
C:\Program Files\Avolites\PearlExp\Shows\PEXP[4 digit number]\
If the XML file is missing in the new location the show can still be loaded but will be shown as a blank name in the list.

The paths are similar for memory sticks as described in other posts. It is also possible to save shows to and load shows from the root of the hard disc or a memory stick.
The show files consist of AVO.SYS, MEMPOOL.SYS and, in version 2, PEXPSHW.XML.

Hope this helps.

[niclights]

This doesn't explain why the new files are not being seen correctly.

[jhld]

I'm out on a couple of outside gigs now, so won't be able to check into your ideas til I get back to my Expert in a couple of days. I agree with Niclights that it doesn't explain why the files aren't seen. The real mystery is why saving/loading shows was OK until recently.

There is another post I saw today regarding Expert and missing shows. Any relation?

[niclights]

There is another post I saw today regarding Expert and missing shows. Any relation?

I don't think so, no.

The real mystery is why saving/loading shows was OK until recently

I thought you were saying it was ok until upgrade to v2?
Regardless, I'm fairly confident you will find shows saved since upgrade in the path shown & the new structure would explain why a search in Explorer didn't reveal.

Then it will all be about why the software is not looking in the new location on load.

[jhld]

First off, thanks for all of your thoughts. I checked the file structure/s you suggested, and they all were correct — except for the SHOWS folder in PEARLEXP. It was empty. Or rather appeared empty. My IT guy and I figured out that that folder had somehow become corrupted. We renamed it and created a new SHOWS folder and copied all of my shows off the memory stick. Now all is well. The only problem left, is we can't figure out the corruption. While we could rename the folder, we cannot now delete it or it's invisible contents. Any thoughts on that?

Also, as a side note question. How do you delete any shows that you no longer want?. On the Pearl, the shows are listed as the name assigned to it, but there is no way to delete directly. In the SHOWS folder they are listed as numbers.

[niclights]

All strange.

Windows can occasionally mess up handles on directories.

Suggestions from Microsoft:
http://support.microsoft.com/kb/320081

I originally was going to suggest running REGSVR32 /U SHMEDIA.DLL but realise this will likely only work for media files.


Good point re deleting files. I wonder if a shell extension could be written to display names in a Windows Explorer column?

[jhld]

So, yea. How DO I properly delete un-needed shows from the expert? I'm asking again, cos I have a corrupt show file that causes the whole desk to jam up and requires a re-install of Pearl software. I don't want me or someone else to accidentally load this show.

[niclights]

The best suggestion I can give is to identify date of file (I'm presuming you can use Load Show/Previous to give a clue) and then find relevant folder by last modified column in Explorer. You could then double-check it is the correct file by opening the .xml file and viewing the filename.

Awkward but should work.