Plex no longer detecting a season it previously detected

Plex Media Server Metadata & Adding Files
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Server Version#: 1.28.2.6151
Player Version#: Not relevant - affecting all devices

Plex is no longer detecting my Doctor Who (2005), Season 4. I have not made any changes to the files/filenames in years. I watched an episode from Season 4 a few months ago, but now Season 4 is no longer showing.

Hopefully any of this information is useful:

If I go into the show’s watch history, I can see a grayed out line item for previously watched episodes in Season 4.

I do not typically name my files according to plex’s recommendation, but I changed them to be in the Doctor Who (2005) - sXXeXX - episode name.ext format for troubleshooting purposes. This didn’t help.

I downloaded and sifted through my Plex database and could see reference to the Season 4 files. metadata_item#992707 is S04E01 “Partners in Crime”. It’s parent_id is 861466 which is Season 4, and Season 4’s parent_id is 861465 which is Doctor Who (2005).

Thinking that it’s odd to have that (correct) information in the database, I went to a player (web) and searched for “Partners in Crime”. Much to my surprise, it found the result. I can click on it, and play it.

From this screen, it looks like it’s matched properly.

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However, when I click on “Season 4”, it takes me to an alleged Episode 4 - Season 4.

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When I check the file associated with that, it’s Doctor Who (2005) - s00e04 - The Runaway Bride.avi

Checking other episodes of Season 4 gives the same results, so somehow, my Season 4 appears to have been misplaced under Special episode 4.

I’ve tried moving the Specials and/or Season 4 folders outside of the media library and rescanning, but that doesn’t seem to help anything. At this point I’m kind of at a loss so any assistance is appreciated!

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You need to follow the instructions on the plex dance page exactly, any devation will cause it to not work.

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Thanks for the advice, but unfortunately attempting the plex dance several times did nothing.

I ended up moving the files outside of the plex library and deleting the show within Plex. This failed after Season 3 (I kind of expected that) so I deleted the other seasons. I went to the incorrectly associated Runaway Bride episode and tried to delete it but it failed too (also kind of expected).

Ultimately I decided to just run a few SQL queries to remove all traces of the corrupted episode after making a backup of the database. I found the metadata item and worked through various relationships and IDs until I found anything important - metadata, media items, media parts, and media streams, then deleted the offending rows in one transaction. If anyone sees this down the road, I would not suggest trying this unless you know what you’re doing - performing this type of action could completely cripple your entire database.

After that, I moved the files back into place and everything is detected again. Unfortunately watch history for the show was lost but I’d much rather have that versus having the data corruption. (Technically the watch history is still in the database, the IDs just don’t match anymore… a project for another day.)

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If you had to take measures like the above, I’m pretty sure they were caused by DB damage.
You might want to perform the “low-level database recovery” steps from this article, rather sooner than later, to remove potentially lingering issues and prevent future data loss: https://support.plex.tv/articles/repair-a-corrupted-database/

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