[stigdu]

I'm running XBMC on my netbook, and have all my films on 2 external hard drives which I connect to the netbook via USB.

My problem is this:

When I go into my 'movies' section, it displays every movie I've put on the external drives, whether the drives are attached via USB or not. Is there some way I can get XBMX to *only* show the films that I have access to? (ie I have the drive attached via USB)

Many thanks

[PatK]

Well you're going to have at least one drive connected? I would set it up with two different profiles one for each drive.. make sure you have your drive letters assigned down the alphabet so you don't run into conflicts.

[stigdu]

Not always no, as I have TV shows on my hard drive so won't connect any external drives to the netbook unless I wanted to watch movies. I would in this case hope that when I went into 'Movies' it would be empty, as I didn't have any external storage attached.

I've just run into a big problem.

I normally have the 2 drives set up through XBMC as D:\ (External Samsung) and E:\ (External Western Digital). However, as for once I conected them to my netbook the other way round to what i normally do, Windows has now assigned the Samsung to E and the Western Digital to D, so as soon as I started up XBMC, it started re-scanning and re-adding all my films again so now everything is duplicated! (I only found out as \I went out to take my baby round the park and got back to find it had added everything again).

Is there a way around this, or is this a Windows peculiarity?

[PatK]

Looks like you have a double scrape from the different way you've attached your HD's. The temp fix is for you to attach the drives as you would normally have them, then use the 'clean library' function in settings/video/library which should put you back in the state you had prior. (ensure that 'update library' on start-up is NOT toggled, and export your library as separate files).

But the long term solution is to manually set your drive letters as 'X' and 'Y' (Computer>R+MB>manage>disk management>R+MB on drive>change drive letter path), re-scrape; then set-up profiles for each drive and a profile without drives if you like... there is really no issue if you don't use the clean-up or update features of XBMC and if the drives are not available you'll get a requester pointing to the fact the selected movie is not online (it does ask if you want to delete the listing) but if you use the profile, you never see this. Profiles only work with the listings in the library.. so things like clean-up and update will cause issues if you don't have your drives online.

You might say this is a Windows peculiarity (musical chairs), but other O/S will run into this if the physical media is not available on a clean-up or update.

[stigdu]

That's very helpful advice, PatK - thanks very much. I'll try all that out a bit later.

[live4ever]

Yes manually set the drive letters. "S:" for Samsung and "W:" for Western Digital sound good to me.