Came home this afternoon to find the power supply in my MCE box dead. Thought briefly about just ordering a new XPS 420 from Dell but that wouldn’t solve the problem of needing to record The Wire tomorrow night.
Scrounged up a power supply but it wouldn’t fit the stupid Cooler Master Cavalier case and I realized that there’s no way CompUSA would have a replacement with such an oddball size, so I dusted off off the old desktop PC for some major surgery. Move over motherboard, CPU, and boot drive. Take the 3GB RAM from the old desktop. Grab an unused 250GB IDE drive and a pair of DVD burners from my bookshelf. Took a couple of hours but the upgrades made it worth it. And this case has no annoying blue LEDs.
Move all the recorded TV to the new drive and tell MCE to record there. Start copying my archived shows back from the WHS box — which doesn’t work well for MCE storage — to the old C: drive. Remove the old Recorded TV share and create two new ones, update the Local Security Policy to allow anonymous access to those shares, triple-check the perms.
Go on my Vista desktop, update the WatchedFolders, restart the Media Center Sheduler service, launch MCE… and I’ve got no recordings. WTF? On the XP side I see the shares having active connections. From Vista I can do net use * \\path\share /user:"anonymous logon" to connect to the shares just fine, and if I launch a dvr-ms file it loads right up in MCE, but they just won’t show up in Recorded TV. I’ve rebooted both machines a bunch of times, run gpupdate, cursed mightily and smoked a couple of cigarettes, but Vista still refuses to see the shows on the MCE2005 system.
I am frustrated and annoyed. Comments are open.
Update: It gets weirder. The files that are being copied are showing up in Vista as each one finishes. The stuff that was already there is not showing up.
After much moving of files in and out of the Recorded TV folders, all of my recordings are finally showing up 
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