Ok so the motherboard/cpu combo from Newegg recently crashed on me. Only been a few months but it was my backend and held everything. The harddrivers and everything else seems ok. When i checked for the same item from Newegg it seemed not to exist anymore or be out of stock. Last time that happened Newegg refunded my money. So my question is, if that happens this time, is there a way to bring up Mythtv without loosing everything. I havent run myth-backup in awhile or anything. I don't think linux works the same way as windows, where i can just plug in a new motherboard and windows installs all the drivers for me and i can go, i would have to manually load those correct? So is there a guide or a way to do this?

Wow, that's a tough one. If you already had a current backup you'de be in good shape. So the challenge is either how to make a good backup or proceed without one...

The first thing I'd do is just try it. If the boards are similar enough you might be able to have it work 90% or better with no fiddling. This is because a lot of the HW detection and setup is done at boot time. Besides which all you need is minimal functionality, mainly text console and hard disk so you can run a backup. If that works you can do an "upgrade" and you should be golden.

If the boards are too different... We're probably talking about using the CD as a rescue disk and playing some mount and symlink games so you can back up the DB. Backing up the filesystem stuff is a bit more straightforward since it's just a tar ball containing three directories these days. See the R5C7 upgrade hints for how to do that.

Please... If anything, Linux is far more graceful and forgiving in cases like this. There are several posts on the forum about disaster recovery. Have you searched? There is also I post I made about fsck not fixing my drive. The entry filesystem ended up under lost+found. However with my database files still in places, I was still able to recover.

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cesman

When the source is open, the possibilities are endless!

Yea i did search, under hardware failure, motherboard failure, backup. I didn't think to search under disaster recovery sorry. I will do that.

I remember one time with an old version of knoppmyth, i had backedup cause i was putting in a new motherboard, i put in the new mother board, and myth would not boot, it kept haning during the initialization process. So i had to do an upgrade. That's why i thought it didn't work the same way, cause i put in a new motherboard in windows and it finds it all fine and works.

Hi,
Since it was a hardware failure as in motherboard and not a drive crash, if you hang it on a simular box things will most likely be better than you think. Move what ever cards you can (video, ethernet, audio) Video will be your torn if it was a mobo video but totally repairable, network would be netcardconfig, audio would be alsaconf.

As cesman put it so nicely, Your content should be fine, trick is to recover the mysql files in mythconverg as that ties it all together.

When my motherboard had an early demise, I built a new system of simular size, with a couple of "extra 5 gig partitions" and once it was all up and operating added entries to the fstab. I then stuffed the treasured drive into an external usb, shutdown the backend, mounted the usb partitions 1 & 4 then copied items of need to the new drive to the proper locations. It takes a while.. but it works. The extra partitions? I copied the original root partition to one of the spares, and installed edubuntu into another and now I can boot into them also. Just be carefull, go slow.

I would venture to say, maybe 2 cups of coffee should cover the task Save the wine for after.

Mike

Hey dardack, how did it go? Have you tried the new motherboard?

My mobo fried at the weekend (hopefully the rest survived - it won't POST), except in my case it is a PoS Dell which would cost an arm and a leg to replace, and I have a standard PSU available to power a new $50 mobo. Both (diffferent) onboard video.

So, did you try just slotting it in? Did it work? Otherwise, I'm going to have to try to get creative, as described above...

Well, I inserted my new motherboard to replace the one that wouldn't POST (arrived within 24 hours of ordering, on 3-day shipping from newegg - I'm impressed). When removing the old motherboard I noticed that one corner of the CPU cooler bracket had broken, leaving the cooler hanging off, which may have had something to do with the failure . So I assumed the CPU (Northwood Celeron) might be destroyed too.

However, the Intel throttling must have saved the CPU, because in the new mobo it booted just fine. The system (R5A12 or perhaps 16) kind-of came up, to the point of starting the backend, when some ivtv (I use PVR-350 TV-out) messages sprawled across the screen and the machine hung. Messages about failing to set up the network went by too...

So I booted a live linux CD (DSL in this case, but the knoppmyth disk + Ctrl-Alt-F2 would have worked), and mounted the / partition, edited /etc/X11/XF86Config-4 to the version to output to the monitor (preserved from installation time), but no joy - the same thing happened. So, I edited /etc/inittab to set the default runlevel to 1. Then I got in. I then went to /etc/rc5.d and started things up to but not including the backend. Once there I ran mythbackup, which appeared to work up to the point it starts the backend where I had the same lockup. So it didn't fully finish, but later examination showed some fairly decent tar files in the /myth/backup dir.

I then did an upgrade to R5C7, and apart from having to s/fb0/fb1/g in the XF86Config-4, it worked automagically. Oh, and the restore complained about a badly terminated archive or something - probably as a result of the hung mythbackup. In hindsight, I should have edited out backend start from mythbackup - it doesn't seem to serve any purpose except to politely resume(?). Overall, I couldn't have hoped for a less painful procedure really. I think the ivtv driver was a little flaky in my old install - who knows, with a newer one I might not even have had to reinstall.

Now, I'm off to re-customize my installation. I notice apt-get install screen or slimserver doesn't work... Hmmm, are extra installations locked down now...? I hope not - time to investigate.

Seet the wiki page about switching to the stable repository. After doig that you can get many things without difficulties.

Hi,

When you switched to the new mother board, unless it was an exact flavor, you should expect errors.

netcardconfig to reset ethernet
alsaconf to reset audio
edit XF86Config-4 to vesa (just to xserver get going)
and then later to the proper driver if possible.

However, R5C7 upgrade works too Just don't change the hostname.
Mike

Thanks for the info. I think there was something messed up about my ivtv setup (R4A16), so my mythbackend startup froze things.

Still, I was pleased to discover I could boot to runlevel 1 and from there easily do a mythbackup. I might try to put that in the Wiki somewhere appropriate.

My apt repositories from R5C7 appeared to be for stable, but not quite as in the Wiki. For one thing they said "deb http://ftp... Once I made them exactly as the Wiki, I could at least "apt-get install screen", which makes me happy .

Back in the first week in June my motherboard on my backend fried. I replaced it with a different flavor of board. The box boot right back up and gave me no problems what so ever.

The first board was made by MSI
The replacement board was made by Chaintech.

The board has been working perfectly for the last month now.