Pear Expert problem

Questions or discussions about the Titan and classic consoles and software.

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Tim Miller
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Pear Expert problem

Postby Tim Miller » 04 Mar 2008, 07:31

Our nice soundguys decided to kill power on us. The board lost the entire show. The patch was still there, just no show. When we tried to load from USB it wiped everything... Has anyone else ran into issues when the board is not powered down properly?
Pearl 2000 upgraded to 2004
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jhld
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Postby jhld » 04 Mar 2008, 21:33

Go t the Expert Mysteries thread - I'm discussing similar problem there
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niclights
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Postby niclights » 05 Mar 2008, 01:57

I don't think that is related.

Obviously sudden loss of power has the potential to cause problems. It has been designed so this shouldn't be possible but it is good practice to save often to HDD just in case.

I've never actually looked into the significance of the two .sys files but I wonder if avo.sys contains patch? This could explain why you might be able to lose just show data.
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Postby Tim Miller » 05 Mar 2008, 03:14

The console actually lost the patch also. Sorry for the mistake. It lost all the show data.
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neil
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Postby neil » 05 Mar 2008, 22:26

Yep. Creamfields 2007.

We had this issue, generators were dying, and Pearl Experts wiping themselves.... Nothing we could do, as we didn't (for whatever reason I don't know) have UPSs'...

One Pearl Expert wiped the memories, pallets the whole lot. Nothing we could do, apart from to re-program....A similar thing happened to me at Bestival on the D4, a week later, but the issues with that are more 'complicated'.

Also, a prep issue really, but patching fixtures that were not in the internal HD on a Pearl Expert in a field was not fun. I had to have TFTs and all sorts, compared to the 'old' way of sticking in a disc...

I spose its the age we live in, but its almost like a leap back in time, to have to have a load of external stuff to get 1 personality for a fixture.
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Neil
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niclights
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Postby niclights » 06 Mar 2008, 01:56

I did propose a while back that the console should come fitted with some sort of basic UPS that could at least guarantee a safe save/exit in emergency to avoid these problems. The same for the D4 I guess.
But this does again highlight the need to get into the habit of frequent saves. This might have been impractical with floppies but now that it's instant there's no good reason not to. And each one becomes a new file itself, giving even more security and the added bonus of an 'undo' option.

I do agree that getting new personalities into the desk is a nightmare, unless there's something I'm missing. This hopefully will be addressed, one way or another.

But I would recommend having a VDU attached at all times for the same reasons one should always be used with a D4. It can be a tad inconvenient but the benefits of the faster hardware and extra controls far outweigh this for me. If there was one thing I don't like about these newer consoles in general it is the time to boot operating systems from HDD's. When things go wrong I miss the instant on from ROM's!
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Postby Tim Miller » 07 Mar 2008, 08:09

seems like roms are much harder to corrupt than hard drives. I cant wait until solid state drives really begin to take the place of these big hard drives. I dont understand why the console is not properly saving shows onto flash. I had a problem with the console saving the show to flash at another show, i ended up burning the show to CD.
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niclights
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Postby niclights » 07 Mar 2008, 17:35

I would say technically ROM's are impossible to corrupt! But it's a compromise over flexibility if nothing else.

What is this problem about saving to USB? You were previously talking about sudden power loss which is a different thing.

I do know some USB drives are not seen as a drive by the software. I'm unsure if anyone has figured out why yet (in Windows the drives are sometimes seen as fixed rather than removable, this being the issue AFAIK).

But you should always be able to save to HDD and then transfer manually to USB through Windows Explorer if required. Since at this stage everything is handled by Windows there should be no problems at all unless the flash drive itself was faulty. Obviously this would most likely also require you to manually move the files back to HDD in a backup/transfer situation. Ideally much better to find a compatible drive in the first place!
CoenCo
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Postby CoenCo » 07 Mar 2008, 18:37

About some USB-devices not being recognized:
The GrandMA range has this problem too, there is some info about it here:
http://www.wikima.net/wiki.cgi/Hardware/Usbsticks
Apparantly some USB sticks identify themselves in a different way. The most common version should identify as class08 subclass06, you can verify this using: USBDeview
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niclights
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Postby niclights » 08 Mar 2008, 01:53

Very useful. Tnx for that.

I should point out here (albeit an Expert thread!) that this is especially important on the 2008/Tiger where you don't have the Windows OS underneath.

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