Need Help with Media Manager Recovery

WebSissy wrote on 3/4/2008, 12:18 PM
I'm a 40 year IT pro. I'm also a high-level 28 year power user on the PC and a Linux/apache and MySQL admin. In short, I'm not a novice.

I'm a long time user of version 4 and licensed version 8 in Oct/Nov & installed it. I also upgraded v8 to to build 2.17 in January. In mid February, my primary 500gb HD went down after a power failure that wiped out its bootstrap but left the rest of the drive intact. I bought a 2nd 500gb drive and copied everything from the old drive then reinstalled all my apps on the new drive. The old drive is still sitting here untouched until I'm convinced I've recovered everything from it.

When my drive went down I was working on a video project although I wasn't editing or changing it at the moment of the crash. The primary video files for the project were located on another drive that was unaffected by the crash; but the work files and all the intermediat copies were on the drive that lost its bootstrap. After my recovery and reinstall process for Vegas, Media Manager seems to have lost all of it's sub-definitions of the parts of the video I was working on. I can see the files in the directory on my recovered drive; but Media manager doesn't seem to know they're there. I presume that's because the MSSQL database that held those definitions has not been recovered yet. Since Vegas and Media Manager created those definitions themselves when they were installed, I have NO idea where to go looking for the MSSQL (Microsoft Sequel server) database they created on my has-no-bootstrap but is otherwise undamaged hard drive.

Can someone please advise me how to recover and rebuild that missing MSSQL database? It contains dozens of definitions of clips and subclips of my video that I'd really rather NOT lose! It took dozens of hours to build them... (sigh!)

One more relevant piece of info... Even though I've recovered the data from the crashed drive drive and reinstalled Vegas 8.0a and re-upgraded to 8.0b and have used the Vegas editor (with Media Manager) on new video segments (since the reinstall) to add new clips and subclips to my video, when I restart Vegas now, it gets to the end of the startup process and displays an error window that says "media library Default could not be opened"

In short, even though media manager was there and working a week after the crash and recovery (a full week ago), when I open vegas today the media manager library seems to have gone missing again...

What gives here?? Does anyone have any ideas or suggestions?

Thanks very much!!

Comments

kentwolf wrote on 3/4/2008, 3:22 PM
>>...the media manager library seems to have gone missing again...

I trust you are aware that the actual library is located in your My Documents/Sony Media Libraries, or something like that.

If the file's not there, it's not there. You may want to make sure the actual library file name wasn't changed to something other than the default.
WebSissy wrote on 3/4/2008, 8:47 PM
Thanks for the reply, kentwolf. Yes, I did realize the database was stored in the "Sony Media Library" folder in "my documents". SO that hint didn't help me much. And in the end the solution to this ended up being really REALLY ugly!

Nothing I tried would solve the problem (which involved the Media Manager's outright refusal to read my Media Manager database) except to completely uninstall both the Sony Media Manager and all parts of MSsql (using add/remove programs in Control Panel) and then remove the Sony media manager database folder (the one in the "Sony Media Library" folder of "my documents"), and finally to remove the "Microsoft Sql Server" folder from "Program Files". After that, I restarted my system and reinstalled the entire Sony Media Manager component and the MSSQL Database Manager and the Sony Media Manager database too. And finally the Media Manager started to work again; but of course I had, along the way lost ALL my historical data from the Media Manager's library database

I tried a dozen less drastic solutions including uninstalling the media manager and the mssql database components and reinstalling them; but unless the database itself got recreated, media manager refused every time to open its default library database. I even looked for some sort of a recovery tool for a crashed MSSQL database but couldn't find one. Sigh!

If anyone here knows of a way to do a recovery on what I can only assume must be a damaged MSSQL database, I'd certainly like to know how to do that. Having everything riding on a database you don't control and can't recover once it's damaged is an absolutely ridiculous situation as far as I'm concerned. I did save a copy of my damaged database off to the side just in CASE somone can tell me how to recover or rebuild it.

Thanks for the suggestion, kentwolf. I honestly wish it HAD helped!

Best
websissy