[mythtv-users] Rebuilding a FE/BE system (the stupid way)

William Powers wepprop at gmail.com
Wed Jan 16 20:01:13 UTC 2013


On Jan 16, 2013, at 9:15 AM, Science Technician <SCITECH at combebank.kent.sch.uk> wrote:

> ...snip...
> 
> The HDs have plenty of space to partition but it is set up using LVM something I am not really familiar with and had I know Fedora was going to use it I would have opted for Ubuntu.
> 
> The set up is one small HD and one 1TB HD. I would like if possible to end up with the new Ubuntu + Myth to end up on the small HD and all Media to be on the 1TB H

...snip...

Not knowing how the system is spread across the two hard drives makes it hard to answer your question, so I will have to speculate.  Back before storage groups I would frequently set up a MythTV system on two hard drives as follows:  One hard drive might have one partition for the OS, a second partition for swap and a third partition for the rest of the drive.  That third partition and the entirety of the second hard drive would would be combined into a single LVM volume group and used to store recordings.

Another way to set things up is with a (relatively) small boot partition with everything else combined into a single LVM volume group.  In this latter case, most of the OS and all of the recordings are in that one volume group together.  This is probably not the ideal setup.

Assuming the former setup, you should first back up the database as Mike described. One good place for a copy of the backup is inside the recording volume group.  For other copies, you could use flash drives or even a CD or DVD if the machine has an optical drive.

You may also want to write down the LVM mounting info in /etc/fstab for later reference.

From this point you can do anything you want to the OS partition, including reformatting it and doing a clean install of another Linux distro.  During the install, the installer will probably find the volume group and offer to mount it for you.  If not, once the install is complete you can modify fstab to add the mounting stanza for the volume group.  Once the volume group is mounted you should have access to your recordings and the copy of the database backup you placed there.  You can then complete the easy MythTV upgrade process Mike described.

If I have guessed wrong about your setup, I apologize.  If you can better describe your LVM setup, I am sure someone will know what your best option is.

Bill






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