When I initially installed MythTV, I told it to store the files in /media/sda1, which was supposed to be my empty hard drive with 500GB free space. It turned out, however, that the filesystem there had become corrupted somehow, and it wasn't mounting properly at startup, so the files were actually stored on my main HD, together with the OS in a regular folder at /media/sda1.

So, I figured the solution was easy, just re-format the drive, move the files onto it, and mount it at /media/sda1, where the files were stored before...MythTV will never notice the difference, right?

Wrong. After the change, Mythbackend crashes every time I try to view the list of recordings, or check the machine status.

Any ideas what else needs to be done to make this transformation work?

Just a stab in the dark here, but are permissions correct?
Depending on how you transferred data to the correct partition you may have all the files owned by root, or with the wrong permissions.

I don't think that would cause the whole backend to crash though...

Thanks! Good call on it being a permissions problem...I'd transferred the files in a maintenance shell, so they all ended up belonging to root...guess I'm still getting the hang of things in Linux. After changing the folder and file ownership to mythtv:mythtv, everything started working perfectly again.

Well, there was one more panic moment...I'm using a networked tuner (the HDHomerun), and it seems that when there aren't any tuners available to the backend, it looks like nothing is scheduled to record...no warnings, just nothing marked for recording...even the "upcoming recordings" list comes up blank, saying "nothing is scheduled to record". For a while I thought the database of scheduled recordings had gotten corrupted or deleted. And I really flipped out when I found I couldn't schedule anything to record. But I eventually realized that with the backend having crashed out about 10-15 times, it had eventually managed to take the HDHomerun down with it, after restarting the tuner, all my recordings came back, in time to record our prime-time shows.

Thanks again!