Stuck in crash recover mode.

Ahoyskin shared this question 8 years ago
Need Answer

I initially quit TuneSpan because it got stuck around 80 gb of my 103.5 gb span. I reopened the program and spanned in recovery mode and it is now stuck at 79.1 gb after 5 hours. I really wish I could start from scratch and do smaller gb spans, but that doesn't seem like an option. Can anyone please help?

Replies (12)

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Thanks for getting in touch. I'm sorry you've run into an issue.


Where exactly do you get stuck? Is it during the copying and updating locations phase?


Do you get any alert from the system of from TuneSpan, or do thing just appear stuck?


By chance, could it just be that the UI is not updating, but TuneSpan is still working in the background? You could test this by resizing the window to see if the UI updates. This is an elusive bug that happens occasionally.

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Thanks for your prompt response!


It gets stuck in the "spanned and waiting to verify" stage. No alerts from the system or TuneSpan, it's just dragging along. Like a song every 15 minutes or so.


It doesn't seem to be that the UI isn't updating. Everything is slow, however. It took several minutes just to quit iTunes.

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So...does anyone know if I can start from scratch? I've been doing this for nearly 24 hours and can barely move my cursor.

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I'm so sorry I couldn't get back to you yesterday.


So, there is actually no way to just "start from scratch." In fact, TuneSpan is essentially done with the bulk of the spanning process. The files have been copied to their new location, and the locations have been updated in iTunes.


The part that has not been completed is the verification phase where TuneSpan double checks everything and more importantly trashes all of the original files.


To get back to where you started, you would have to undo what has been done. And the easiest way to do that would be to do so through TuneSpan.


But, all you really want to do is to clean up the original files and make sure everything is properly marked in TuneSpan.


You can do this without starting over completely. I can give you advice on how to do this, and it's not super hard, but it is a detailed process. I'll get back to you shortly with more information. I should be able to find some previous advice I've given another user for this situation which will save me from having to type it all again.

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Here is some information on the first steps to take:


What we want to happen is to get TuneSpan to trash all the original files that have actually been properly copied and spanned without having to do that manually while not fully backtracking to lose the work that’s already been done with the file copying and all that.

So getting out of Crash Recovery is very easy, it’s just knowing how to proceed from there that’s the hard part.

To get out of crash recovery, just launch TuneSpan and do not let it reattempt the span. Then, quit TuneSpan and you’ll get a prompt saying it’s in crash recovery and one of the button options will be “Quit & Don’t Recover”. After you choose that, TuneSpan will just quit and the next time you launch it it won’t be in crash recovery.

From there, TuneSpan will see all those files are on your external, but it will think that’s the original location of the files… they won’t be marked as spanned. So, first, we need to get them marked as spanned.

To mark all your tracks on the external as spanned, go to the All media type and select your external drive in the Media Locations list. Now your track list only shows tracks whose files are on the external. Highlight all the tracks in the track list (click any one row in the track list and Command+A), and then right-click the selection and you’ll see a “Force Span / Restore” submenu. In there, select Force Span. That will probably take a moment with so many tracks. You won’t get any feedback and it may appear TuneSpan is frozen for a moment, but trust that its working properly… do not quit or force quit, just wait for TuneSpan to reload. When the process is done, TuneSpan will reload and you’ll see all your tracks on the external are marked as spanned.

Now, that is just the beginning. We haven’t begun to deal with the stray files left in the original locations or anything. We just got TuneSpan’s database to know the tracks are spanned. So, let know when you’ve done what I’ve described so far and then I can get back to you with the next steps.

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I went through the initial steps as you said, but I have no option to "Force Span/Restore" in a submenu when I right click. What am I doing wrong?


I do have the option to remove tracks from my spanlist. Would it hurt to remove tracks and try to "start from scratch" with smaller spans?

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Which right click menu are you looking in? It should be in the right menu for the track list.


Everything that is in your Span List is likely already pointing to the files on the external drive. Is this true? If so, there is no need to span them again. As I mentioned the next steps is to get everything properly marked as spanned and then get the stray original files removed from your internal drive.

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I figured it out. I was supposed to select everything under the "Smart Album Column" under "Smart Rows". I've now followed all your steps (including the scripts) but TuneSpan still shows the same number of items in my items to be spanned window. What should I do to clear these items? Also, when I ran the script and deleted the files it only cleared 43 gb as opposed to the 90 gb that I had spanned before the crash. Why?

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That's o.k. I appreciate your efforts in trying to resolve the issue. I did another span last night, but after 16 hours I had to have my computer back. I got all the way to 93 gb done on that try, but it just froze there and the only option I had was to force quit. If you can give me the details that would be great. The software has always worked fine for me, and is probably the best app I have ever purchased for my Mac. I figure the issue either must be iTunes related or I simply tried to do too large a span all at once. Next time I'll do small batches instead.

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It sounds likely that it was too much at once :-/

The spanning process requires a lot of disk access and other system resources.

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It would also help me to know a bit about your setup.


How many files were you spanning?


Were all of your files in the default iTunes Media location on your internal drive?

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5,000 + files. Yes, they were all in the default iTunes media location on my internal hard drive.

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Cool. So, once you've completed the steps described above to get out of crash recovery and to mark everything as properly spanned, you should be able to use this AppleScript from Doug's Scripts (http://dougscripts.com) to isolate and trash all of the stray files left behind from the incomplete span.


http://dougscripts.com/itunes/scripts/ss.php?sp=musicfolderfilesnotadded2

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If you use that script though, just make absolute sure about what files you're selecting to trash and double check that they were all the ones you spanned and that they are showing up as being on the external drive in TuneSpan.

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Thank you. Should I force span everything I initially tried to span (the 5,000 + tracks) or should I try to do it in smaller increments?

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Force Spanning doesn't take nearly the resources of the actual Spanning process so doing all of them at once should be fine. But if you want to be cautions its fine to do a couple sets.

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Right, but I have spanned items in that location already (my external hard drive). When I open the location, as you told me, it contains all of my previously spanned titles, too. So it seems like I can only force span a few titles max at a time anyway. Should I look for something after I force span these titles? Perhaps something that I should delete (i.e. what would be found in bulk quantity listing within the Doug's Scrips app)?

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Its no issue if you force span stuff that's already spanned. If you follow the instructions I posted before, you can Force Span infinite tracks at once.


I'm heading out of service now and won't be back available until Tuesday.

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Thanks. I'll let you know how it goes.

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Oh, and I have much more spanned on my external drive besides this span. I have been spanning to an external for a few years now.

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