One thing I always do before re-installing the OS is use the "dump" program to backup my data partitions to my recordings RAID array or another system. I run something like this:<div><br></div><div>service mythbackend stop</div>
<div>service mysqld stop<br><div>dump -0 -j -f /path/to/other-disk/<a href="http://root-dump.bz">root-dump.bz</a> /</div><div>dump -0 -j -f /path/to/other-disk/<a href="http://var-dump.bz">var-dump.bz</a> /var</div></div>
<div>dump -0 -j -f /path/to/other-disk/<a href="http://var-lib-mysql-dump.bz">var-lib-mysql-dump.bz</a> /var/lib/mysql (if it's a separate partition from /var)</div><div><br></div><div>I then shutdown, unplug my "other disk" and reinstall the OS. Once the OS is reinstalled, I can mount the other disk and use "restore -if /path/to/other-disk/<a href="http://root-dump.bz">root-dump.bz</a>" to individually select which files I want to restore. It's very straight-forward. I did this on my front-ends before wiping CentOS and installing Fedora 17 as well. This way I could restore lirc configs, /etc/modprobe.d files, etc.</div>
<div><br></div><div>/Brian/</div><div><br></div>