[mythtv-users] storage groups - is there an index? (lost a hard drive)

[mons37318 at mypacks.net]

mytharchie continues to fail to work (varying from "properly" to "at all" so we've had to Keep Adding Drives (not my faorite solution)

pardon, my V key is cranky today. if i sound Cockney, or Irish or whateer "hae" sounds like, ignore it.

had to install new hard drive. (additional)
couldn't mount it - someway - brother ended up playing with the file systems till he'd gotten them all mounted

myth locked PC up hard if one started playing while recording

brother got new SATA controller that theoretically controlled 4 drives
brother found out some RAID something or other (I have to guess from the mumbling as he doesn't narrate)
like, it only does RAID and that it was missing mounting a drive or two - like the boot drive.

tried some workarounds
no luck
pulled controller, replaced with old, rebooted, made sure myth was up and... well, we missed one check... and left

finally tried to record - myth screamed that it could not create "ring buffer" (except when I tried to record NOT live TV, when it didn't say anything but also did not record)

found error 117

pulled out the VCRs to see if any worked

somewhere in the night...
the 2TB drive mounted at /appl/media4 (which is an xfs file system) dismounted.

strangely (or really not so much) DVR started recording again. (theory - now that I don't have to write to /appl/media4, I won't try and so I won't fail)

brother unmounted media manually

myth's database seems healthy and not hosed. there are a lot of links to files it can no longer find, it deals with this by trying to play them and then giving up.

so here is the question:

what does myth use to keep track of which files go to which entries in the Recorded database?

and the exciting corollary
 
if I start myth (I didn't say "reboot computer" - I think that would be a bad idea)
 
and myth lives its life as if appl/media4 doesn't exist

it will record new recordings on drive 1 (or whatever drive it is - the mount point is /appl/media/recordings (cause, you know, we couldn't be consistant in the naming)

Will *anything else* get damaged? (the database looks healthy but that's just based on the idea that it will toss a file into the Recorded list on the frontend - whether it can actually create a file or not)

all the crappyness is on /appl/media4 as far as I can see

brother is working on figuring out how xfs_repair works before trying to actually run it (there were so many switches and such that I feared to touch it (I speak pidgin Linux) and it seems he isn't quite ready to give it a shot either (plus he's at work now, and it's only his second day and he has odd hours, which he isn't disclosing)

if I 
don't transcode
don't move any files
don't delete anything from mythfrontend

will mythtv damage itself by writing new files to /appl/media/recordings (which is the first disk - xfs - in the (storage group?) and the only one with free space?

also, is there a way to check for errors on appl/media/recordings, */media2 and *media3 ?

as noted, we hae the original controller back in the machine.

Pam Ashworth (via one of her anonymous throwaway email addresses)