[mythtv-users] Adding new 1 Terabyte Drive and Moving existing Recordings

David Brodbeck gull at gull.us
Tue Jan 6 18:07:36 UTC 2009


Lindsay Mathieson wrote:
> On Wed, 7 Jan 2009 12:44:19 am Kevin Kuphal wrote:
>> r better yet, move everything to the new drive, mount the new drive where
>> the old drive was mounted in your filesystem, then remount the old drive in
>> a new place for videos.  Don't have to change anything for Storage Groups.
> 
> How do you copy it? a simple "cp -a " won't get the boot stuff will it?

I don't recommend moving a boot drive.  However, if you have to, this
*usually* works:

1. Install both drives, keeping the old drive as the primary.  Boot off
a rescue CD, or into single-user mode.  (You don't want anything writing
to the disk during this procedure.)

2. Use dd to copy the entire old drive to the new drive.  For example,
if the old drive is /dev/hda and the new one is /dev/hdb, do something
like "dd if=/dev/hda of=/dev/hdb bs=1M".  MAKE SURE YOU DON'T MIX UP THE
"if" (input file) AND "of" (output file) ARGUMENTS!  This is where you
can really shoot yourself in the foot.  This step will take a while so
go have a beer or something.

3. Re-cable so the new drive is the primary.  The system *should* boot
OK off the new drive at this point, if the silicon gods have smiled on you.

4. Use parted or something similar to enlarge the partition(s) to fill
the whole disk.


Keep the old drive as-is until you complete the whole process, so if
something goes wrong you can go back to the old one.  Note that step 4
may not be possible if the partition you want to enlarge isn't the last
one on the disk.


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