I tried to reboot my BE/FE after a feisty --> gutsy update and now I get a kernel panic vfs sync message at boot. I took the drive out and put it in an external enclosure and tried to get at the mysql db from another machine.

The drive will not show up and it sounds like it is not fully spinning up when power is applied. I tried another known good drive at it works fine in the enclosure so that is not the problem. I'm guessing the drive is dead.

So...my recordings and videos are on a secondary drive so they are safe but w/o the db I have no idea what recording is what w/o watching it. I'll be reinstalling the OS (may try KM or mythbuntu this time) on a new drive.

Is there an easy way to populate the mysql tables with what is in the recordings folder?

Or do I just start over and move the recordings to the videos folder and rename them once I know what they are?

I tried KM originally and liked it - can't remember why I went with ubuntu + myth pacjkages.
Thanks for any help.

I used to run myth on Fedora, (before mythdora.) I botched the FC4->FC5 upgrade, what seems like years ago... Trying to fix the database to recognize my recordings was what finally convinced me to go with KM. I had access to the old database and STILL had trouble loading the recordings. I finally just copied the files into the video directory like you said.

I assume Mythbuntu doesn't have a "pretty" directory where you can find nicely named links to your recordings? Without that, you can still use mplayer to view the program outside of myth, then copy it to videos with a friendly name. Renaming the files after VideoManager imports them is a bit of a pain.

On the other hand, since that time there have been some helpful how to's written; so it might be possible now to import into recordings.

nope - no mythpretty. I installed mythbuntu last night and all is working out of the box with my pvr-350.
I have all my recordings and my try to edit them with kino and then transcode to smaller size and then move to the videos dir.

Seems like an "Import old recordings" function/script might be useful.

There is one. See this wiki page for that and more: http://www.knoppmythwiki.org/index.php?page=RepairingMythConvergDB

Thanks but I do not have myth.rebuilddatabase.pl and that link doesn't have the script. I'll google it and post the link if/when I find it.
I don't have that backup script either...

edited to add:

I found the myth.rebuilddatabase in the contrib dir as an archive. When I tried to run it here is what I get:

myname@mymythbox:~$ sudo perl myth.rebuilddatabase.pl
Can't locate Date/Parse.pm in @INC (@INC contains: /etc/perl /usr/local/lib/perl/5.8.8 /usr/local/share/perl/5.8.8 /usr/lib/perl5 /usr/share/perl5 /usr/lib/perl/5.8 /usr/share/perl/5.8 /usr/local/lib/site_perl .) at myth.rebuilddatabase.pl line 54.
BEGIN failed--compilation aborted at myth.rebuilddatabase.pl line 54.

edited again to add:

I had to install date:parse for perl and it is working but I wish I would have used the \y switch - I have a lot of old recordings to re-import.

Thanks!

any help?

Yeah, one suggestion, why not upgrade to KnoppMyth while you're at it. All of these tools come packaged with it out of the box, and all of our procedures and documentation apply to that.

You're asking us how to do things, and we're providing the best answers we have, but as you've noticed they may not be completely relevant for you because you're using a different distro which doesn't have the same amenities, and there's only rather limited experience with said distro to be had here.

That was a big, if understated, part of the fix in my story. A Working Myth box has much higher WAF. KM generally "just works" for me.

For my part KM's focus on being a STB means I leave it alone, and let it do its job. With a desktop distro the temptation to mess around is too strong.