An experience with Daemon Tool and MP (1 Viewer)

[petsa]

Hi!

Since I just spent a long sleep-less night figuring this one out I thought I should share this with the community and hopefully help someone to get their well-deserved sleep if they experience the same issue as I had

A couple of days ago my HTPC, running only MP, stopped going into standby. I have been using MST for a while to ease some issues I've had and also restart MP (and the HTPC) regularly to improve stability. When I checked the "idleness" with MST it indicated that a process required the system and the idleness was lower than the threshold for standby. I was really surprised because nothing had changed on the system! Except for some M$ updates so I started blaming them for the problem...

At first I thought this had to do with MP so I stopped MP but no change. I started going down the list of active processes to stop them one by one but it still refused to go into standby. As the evening turned into night and I started to run out of ideas I begin playing with selective boot, i.e. choosing what services to enable at boot.

I disabled everything to start clean and it took many reboots but finally all services were running (but no other program!) and MST still reported everything was OK. I then started to enable the programs one by one, e.g. LCDSmartie, SpeedFan, MP, TV-Server, 4TR, etc. Everything worked well until I got to Daemon tools, that I use to mount ISOs. As soon as I enabled daemon.exe MST said there was a process preventing standby and the idleness went down. So I disabled daemon.exe and everything was fine. I could not really understand this as Daemon Tools is supposed to sit idle in the background until called for, i.e. when an ISO should be mounted.

So what happened? Now I realized what I had done... A couple of days ago we watched a movie (in MP). This movie was stored as an ISO-file and mounted by Daemon Tools automatically by MP.

Then I did some routine maintenance on the HTPC and noticed the DVD was still mounted. I un-mounted it from an explorer window using "eject". The DVD disappeared and I didn't think of it any more... BUT daemon.exe remembered there was supposed to be a DVD mounted. Apparantly it tried to access the ISO over and over again, preventing standby and keeping the CPU engaged enough to lower the idleness below the threshold for standby. As soon as I un-mounted the DVD from inside Daemon Tools everything was fine again.

Lesson learned? Yes, don't mess with system that works. Not even if you think "this is such a minor thing it won't mess things up" IT WILL!

I'm looking forward to a good night's sleep now

Good luck with your HTPCs!

/Peter

 

[petsa]

Hi again,

The issue turned out to be a little more generic than I first thought...

Since I have all movies on a remote disc the problem got a little more complicated. Apparantly an image mounted with Daemon Tools and residing on another PC causes the system to not become as idle as it would have to for standby. I guess this could be network traffic etc causing it to never settle for standby. As soon as I unmount the image MST reports the system is ready for standby.

So if I stop a movie (from a mounted image, mounted with Daemon Tools) the image will still be mounted so the HTPC won't go into standby. The only workaround as I can see would be to unmount on "Stop". I can tell Daemon Tools to not remount on resume but hfirst I need to make sure the system can standby

If the movie is a regular AUDIO_TS/VIDEO_TS type it will work OK.

Any ideas how to fix this?

/Peter

EDIT: I found a way, tried it, and it works . Here is what I did:

1. Since I already use IR Server Suite I created a macro that first sends "STOP" and then the command "daemon.exe -umount 0"

2. I remapped the "STOP" button on my MCE remote to this macro instead of the "STOP" command it used to be.

IT WORKS!