XXhighend modification request

[hvdh]

Peter,

I have a minor problem with my music PC: every now and then I lose the "connection" to my music disc (the "A" disc (USB) connected to my music PC)

I have no idea what is causing this, but I've learned to live with it, I only need to reboot the music pc and everything is fine.

Except for one thing: If XXhighend is running on the audio PC it "hangs" because A:\music does not exist.

How difficult would it be to slightly modify xxhighend, so that it does not "hang", but instead shows me a pop-up which tells me A:\music does not exist?

It would save me quite a bit of frustration every time this happens....

 

[PeterSt]

Hi Henk,

If it is really just "hangs" then I can't do anything about it. If it is the situation that a popup tells you "Waiting for LAN to come up" (or something like that) we can talk further.

If that is a USB3 connection, you might want to try USB2 to see whether that helps. If Yes, again we can see further (maybe).

Best regards,
Peter

[hvdh]

Hi Peter,

I'm afraid USB2 is not going to make a difference...

If the music disk does not exist I find that if I rightclick the xxhighend icon in the taskbar, that windows tells me that XXhighend is not responding. Which I think means that it "hangs", right? I never get to see the XXhighend window, just the icon....

Yesterday, I reorganised the music PC: I removed all connections, (monitor and USB) re-located the pc in a different location and reconnected everything.

I must have connected my music disk into a different usb port than before, so that the audio PC can't find it, because it is in MINOS (I know, this was not so smart, I should have rebooted the audio PC in MAXOS before I started mucking around with the music PC).

The result:
- XXhighend "hangs" (not responding)
which means I can not get the audio PC out of MINOS
which means I can not unmount the music disk from the audio PC
which means I have a big problem.....

It took me several hours before I found a solution:
I killed XXhighend using the task manager.
I deleted all files that I could find in XXdata that were less than 3 days old.
I restarted XXhighend, immediately set MAXOS and rebooted.

I have no idea why this worked, but it did solve my problems. I could unmount the non-existing disk, remount it, and now everything seems to work just fine.

I would like it very much if I didn't have to worry about this everytime I changed something in either pc though.

[music33]

I noticed if my external USB drive is not turned on and I start xxhighend it hangs.  Not a big deal as for me it is was just stupid that I forgot to turn the power on, but I did panic for a second ;-) 

[hvdh]

Hi Henk,

If it is really just "hangs" then I can't do anything about it.

Hi Peter,

I've been thinking about this for a few days...

Somewhere in xxhighend you use some code to change the state of the OS from MaxOS to MinOS (or the other way around).

If you would isolate that code and make it a small separate program, I could use it to get the PC in MaxOS, find and fix the problem myself, and put the PC back into MinOS before restarting XXhighend.

Would you be willing to do that?

Gr,

Henk

[PeterSt]

Henk,

Can you provide me a most easy example so I can mimic that behavior ?
Please make that example 100% reliable because I don't have the time to destroy everything in order to copy the behavior in your PC, which is, well, kaput.

Best regards,
Peter

[hvdh]

Peter,

This one's quite easy for me:
If I disconnect the USB drive (A\:music) from the music PC, and then start up XXhighend, my RDP of the audio PC looks like this:

https://ibb.co/dhwrWH

- I have started the Task Manager.
- My mouse hovers over the XXhighend Icon in the Taskbar.

XXhighend  does start, but never opens a window, and all I can do is kill it in the Task Manager.

If I re-connect the music drive TO THE SAME USB PORT and restart XXhighend, everything seems to be fine. But if I do not know which port this was and I use another one I am in deep trouble, because the Audio PC will never find it, unless it is in MaxOS, which it isn't...

PS: I'm using the Y: and Z: disks as ramdisks, because A: and B: were already in use when I started to use ramdisks. Just to check, I did once revert back to using A: and B:, as your ramdisk example does, and this does not have any influence on the behaviour demonstrated above....

[PeterSt]

Hi Henk,

Thank you for the clarification. But this is not enough for me. To to be childish, but if I connect a music disk to an USB port, pull it out again and start XXHighEnd, for 100% sure nothing hangs etc. So what I like you to do is :

1. Start XXHighEnd.
2. Clear the Playlist Area (Play button).
3. Quit XXHighEnd.
4. Pull that cable.
5. Start XXHighEnd.
Hangs ? then around #2 apparently more needs to be "fresh" and I don't know what. So the idea is that yuo must create a fresh situation that nothing goes wrong when you pull the A: drive. Done ? Then we continue :

5. Start XXHighEnd (same as above).
6. Do something, which you think incurs for the erroneous situation. E.g. load an album in the Playlist Area.
7. Quit XXHighEnd.
8. Pull the cable.
9. Start XXHighEnd.
Hangs ? then report the exact sequence of matters.
Does not hang ? back to #6.

In the end I need the exact sequence (as lean as possible) to solve it. I must first be able to mimic it ...

Thanks,
Peter

PS: The fact that it requires the same USB port to let it go again, already tells me that it is an OS issues. But I told so right away. This does not mean I possibly can tackle it anyway. I hope.

[hvdh]

Peter,

Thanks for the quick reply.

Before I start doing what you suggest:

You seem to be shure that it is windows that is causing the problems.

I have an ISO for win10 14393.0
I could just run setup, but I'm not exactly shure what happens then....

Does it re-install windows from scratch and do I have to configure everything from fresh?
Or does it (try to) repair windows and everything is what I (hopefully) want it to be?

Do you happen to know which of the two will happen?

All in MaxOS, of  course!

Henk

[PeterSt]

Henk,

No no, I am not suggesting at all that it is an OS issue as such. The issue is just your PC. Point is, the OS is ahead of me in the program of stalling things. So, I / XXHighEnd will do something alright with your drive A:, but it is the OS which does not report anything and hangs on it.
Compare with the situation "Waiting for LAN to come up". There XXHighEnd detects (can detect) that your lastly accessed music file is not accessible, and tells you (or does it herself) to switch on the LAN. A similar situation, but no fault situation like in your case. And I must try to copy your fault situation with you as a guide ...

I hope it is clear a little ?
Peter

[hvdh]

Hi Henk,

Thank you for the clarification. But this is not enough for me. To to be childish, but if I connect a music disk to an USB port, pull it out again and start XXHighEnd, for 100% sure nothing hangs etc. So what I like you to do is :

1. Start XXHighEnd.
2. Clear the Playlist Area (Play button).
3. Quit XXHighEnd.
4. Pull that cable.
5. Start XXHighEnd.
Hangs ? then around #2 apparently more needs to be "fresh" and I don't know what. So the idea is that yuo must create a fresh situation that nothing goes wrong when you pull the A: drive. Done ? Then we continue :

5. Start XXHighEnd (same as above).
6. Do something, which you think incurs for the erroneous situation. E.g. load an album in the Playlist Area.
7. Quit XXHighEnd.
8. Pull the cable.
9. Start XXHighEnd.
Hangs ? then report the exact sequence of matters.
Does not hang ? back to #6.

In the end I need the exact sequence (as lean as possible) to solve it. I must first be able to mimic it ...

Thanks,
Peter

PS: The fact that it requires the same USB port to let it go again, already tells me that it is an OS issues. But I told so right away. This does not mean I possibly can tackle it anyway. I hope.

Peter,

If I clear the Playlist Area, and exit XXhighend, I can restart it again, steps 1 through 5 give me no problems.

Step 5: restart Y:\XXHighEnd\XXHighend.exe (from Ramdisk) This works fine
Step 6: Press the L (library) button. XXhighend is "not responding"

And that is about it.

If I now kill xxhighend, re-attach the drive and restart XXhighend, everything is fine.

[PeterSt]

Henk,

I tried every combination I could think of (with a USB stick which I legally and illegally removed) but I just receive nice error messages (from XXHighEnd) that the path is nor available, something wrong with it, etc.
This is from the Library Area and also from the Playlist Area (tracks remain visible but can not be used and again by more than one message I am told).

What I did not (could not) test is your RAM Disk situation.

So I am afraid that if these kind of things go wrong, you need to "repair" your PC. So I tried, but what I can't mimic, can't be solved either. Plus all the error messages already ...

Regards,
Peter

[PeterSt]

Hi,

Yesterday I ran into the subject of this topic myself …


The main part of this very unpleasant gag is that only after 2 hours and ~40 reboots I found this was the issue. And I will admit : the fact that this topic exists in this forum, helped me greatly with deciding in a split-second that indeed this was the issue. Otherwise it could have cost be 2 hours more to "prove" things.
So what's up ?

Some adapter-brick broke down and a USB hub I used went out of order. I bought a new one, and together with that a docking station for two HDDs (they are the most common these days). I decided to kind of explicitly combine things, and bought a docking station with 3 USB3 ports. So it was/is also presented as a USB hub. I needed exactly these 3 ports, so I gave that a go. No problem, works nicely.

Meanwhile I used that device to fill two HDD's with data in parallel. Mind you, this could not be exactly what they are made for (the two slots are merely there for physically copy (clone) from the one to the other, but alas, that worked too.
Until I though to eject one of those HDDs ... then it appeared that only the both together could be ejected. All right. Something to take into account in the future.
I even remember telling about it over here (a next person could make a mistake) and that "only the complete device" (with two HDDs in it) could be ejected".

Feel it coming ?

First off, this is illegal-ish of course. One shouldn't be ejecting two HDDs at the same time when one might need to eject only one. Yes, it was cheap.
But secondly came yesterday, and by no means I was able to let the "Play" button work in XXHighEnd. All just hung. I also noticed that at quitting XXHighEnd a. it would not quit at all (it remained visible in TaskManager) and b. it couldn't be thrown out with TaskManager. And, because I am also working on the software, I obviously thought I had done something wrong in the hours prior to this happening.
And now it became nasty, because I could not put up a new software version with the old one still running. So that implied the ~40 reboots ...

Then I noticed that the Mach III PC which this was about, would not allow to show me the contents of readily available networked drives; with Explorer it just hung ...
Quickly I noticed that this was exactly about those 3 USB disks I connected via the new "hub", and the combination of the knowledge of this topic, plus my remembrance of throwing out the whole device hence ... hub ... quickly solved it all, finally (use the new 7 ports official hub I bought as well).

Moral :
Even recognizing this as an issue is a tough job;
Because all really hangs, you can't go anywhere;
I now know how hard I tried to use logging to see what happened - it is impossible ("something" deep down hangs and it even remains as a part / process in the system, while XXHighEnd really officially closed - it now comes down to an OS bug (I think I promised that in this topic already)).
I proved to myself that really nothing can be done against this.

About the latter : well, call it an OS bug, but it really is caused by first something else which plainly is not compliant. Hard to fight against that, I'd say. So what will happen in this case is that I eject a HDD, instead the whole device is ejected (you see that all right but you can't see you eject the USB hub) and next the hub is shut down without notification to the OS, decently. In this case it caused the PC behind the LAN (the Mach III in my case) not to be notified that the 3 disks were not there any more (the music Server PC where they were connected to showed it all right). This was even nicely in Normal OS Mode, so all showed "green". But nothing was there any more for real. You can try forever if this is not understood, and the lot will hang forever. Something is just very wrong.

In the end that was Henk's problem too. Something wrong. "Just" take out the cause the soonest ...

Peter