Here's my update for today. I figured I'd run the update again since I had no idea what files failed to copy when I previously ran out of disk space. The upgrade went very fast and got to the reboot earlier than it ever had. After reboot it cycled between starting portmap and starting lighttpd over and over. The logs had errors about no nvidia driver so I tried installing nvidia. It initially errored out because nouveau_blacklist and another file existed.

I renamed those files and was able to install the nvidia package. At this point the GUI came up, albeit with much larger text than I should see and the screen off the edge, but it looked like mythtv. On the F1 tty, starting lighttpd and starting portmap continued to scroll by. I tried restarting rpcbind with no success. I tried stopping it to see if it would break the cycle, again no success.

I rebooted again and now am back to where I was in the previous post with a longer list of services starting over and over.

It's starting to get a little frustrating the way I hurdle one obstacle only to find something else blocking my path and no obvious (to me, at least) indication of the real problem. At this rate it might be less frustrating to install another hard drive, perform a new install to it, work through all the obstacles waiting for me there regarding spdif out, hdmi out, etc and then restore from the old system. I'd really rather sort this out because I feel like I'm so close to getting my system working again. I hope someone who knows what they're doing can tell me how I can try to track my troubles down and fix them. Thanks for the help so far.

DoomedTX, if you stop by the #linhes channel on IRC I will try to help you out. Some of the debugging that might be needed is not forum friendly.

About portmap, it's not needed anymore. Go ahead and run remove_service.sh portmap.

I surely appreciate the offer. It's probably going to be awhile before I have time to work on the mythtv box again, but I'll try to make it in the next few days. Just curious, was installing nvidia a bad move or would I have done that anyway? Thanks again.

Ok, I appear to be getting there. I was going to start up again and join irc but decided to poke around a bit first. I found that once again I was out of space, probably from my db backup.

I went around the / partition deleting things I didn't need, mainly ~1GB of xbmc thumbnail data. After that I had more than 75% free disk space so I tried the upgrade 1 more time.

This time it mostly worked. MythTV started up and appears to be functioning. After restoring, I had to recreate my storage groups and mess with fstab to mount all the drives I needed, but the system more-or-less seems to be working ok. I can watch old recordings, live tv, and schedule recordings.

I still have portmap and lighttpd cycling over and over. As previously instructed, I removed the portmap service. However I cannot get lighttpd to start or see where the exact error is. When I run ps aux I see this line that is pointing me in the right direction:



Clearly something is wrong with lighttpd but I don't know exactly what. I'll look at the /etc/lighttpd/conf.include and see what I can find out. In the meantime, my slave backend seemed to survive the pacman -Syu from the R6 system, but since I'm having trouble with it (including out of space) I might run upgrade again after I free some space. I might also increase my / partitions since they are only 5GB on both systems and often run out of space. I'll keep updating here in case it helps anyone.

Final update for this thread, I think. I traced the lighttpd error to a configuration file that was pointing to mythexport. Since I rarely use mythexport and don't care if I have a web interface, I commented out that line and rebooted. MythWeb seems to work fine, now.

So, after all the trouble, I guess the biggest problem turned out to be running out of hard drive space. It caused everything to behave in an unpredictable manner.

As a parting shot, here's how I plan to keep xbmc (the biggest space hog) from overloading my / partition: I created an xbmc\userdata directory on my myth partition and copied the /home/mythtv/.xbmc/userdata directory there. Then I deleted the one in the .xbmc directory and symlinked it to the /myth partition. Now not only is the userdata directory on a larger partition, it also will theoretically never run out of space because as the drive fills up mythfrontend will automatically expire old programs and free up space.

There are some other odds and ends I'm tracking down and my ION frontend system is a whole other set of problems, but for now I'm closing this thread out. Thanks to all who helped me along.