Hi

Ages ago I completely roached my mythbox by trying to add an additional hard drive. As a result I am rather nervous about trying this.

I have a 500g SATA drive with content on it and I want to expand my storage space by adding 2 hard drives to this. Both are 250g one is SATA and the other PATA. I want like to save the content I have on my 500g drive.

The history of this is I managed to set up a LVM setup on my test rig, by following the steps on the wiki. So I tried to add a second hard drive to my main machine. Which went wrong, partially because the drive had content on it but also due to me not really understand what I was doing.

I've just had another look at the instructions over on the wiki and I am still not feeling confident.

To get around this lack of understanding, could someone help me get through this with some pointers, (or if you prefer some idiot proof instructions I can't get wrong)?

I am using .XFS for storage.

Thanks for advice in advance.

Regards Chris

_________________
Version:R8
Intel C2D 7400, Nvidia 5600 via HDMI to Samsung B37B650TW (PAL), Asus P5QL-E mobo, 4Gb PC6400 DDR2 ram, Samsung Spinpoint 500 Gb & 1Tb drive, Nova-HD-S2 (x2)

Well, I suppose the first thing you need to determine is how you want the system laid out - Do you want one big filesystem for /myth, or do you want to split say /myth/tv and /myth/video for example into separate filesystems? Keep in mind that if you use LVM for your /myth content and any of those drives fails, chances are good you will have lost all of that content. I'm not saying LVM is a bad choice, but it does have it's issues. Other posts regarding LVM:
http://knoppmyth.net/phpBB2/viewtopic.php?t=17161
http://knoppmyth.net/phpBB2/viewtopic.php?t=16908

I assume you currently have content on the 500Gb drive in /myth/XXX that you are trying to save?

Do the 250Gb drives have content on them that you are trying to save?

One note: the upcoming .21 release will include "Storage Groups" which, depending on your storage needs, you may find more to your liking - http://svn.mythtv.org/trac/changeset/12151

Hi slowtolearn,

The two other drives I have do not have content on them. The 500g one does.

Ideally I'd like one of the 250s (pref the sata one) to have /myth/video and the 500g to have /myth/tv. My PATA drive would have the operating system and the swap file etc.

The storage groups sound cool. But I'll be waiting for R6 release for that though.

So how do I go about this, especially as I want to keep the TV recordings - the DVD's I can re-rip.

Regards Chris.

_________________
Version:R8
Intel C2D 7400, Nvidia 5600 via HDMI to Samsung B37B650TW (PAL), Asus P5QL-E mobo, 4Gb PC6400 DDR2 ram, Samsung Spinpoint 500 Gb & 1Tb drive, Nova-HD-S2 (x2)

Based on the above I don't think you want LVM at all. Couple of questions:

1 - Does the 500Gb drive currently have KnoppMyth installed and running on it?

2 - Are you finding that your recordings (just the recordings) are exceeding the amount of space available in /myth?

Assuming the answer to #1 is yes and #2 is no, the easiest thing to do would be to copy whatever videos (NOT recordings) you want to save over to a temporary directory, mount one of the 250Gb drives into the /myth/video directory, then copy the files back. Now you have 250Gb for /myth/video and the 500Gb has more free space for recordings.

A (very) short HowTo on mounting an additional drive: http://www.knoppmythwiki.org/index.php? ... driveHowTo

Annother good read for adding drives --> http://www.linuxplanet.com/linuxplanet/ ... ls/4232/1/

At the end of the day you have to fdisk the drives to an LVM type which means that you will (probably) lose any data on them. It is possible to move the data around from drive to drive to keep it but that won't work on a boot drive. I have built many systems ( and converted many) to and from LVM. It is not hard but is time consuming. The most important thing is to, as slowtolearn says, decide how you want the machine laid out. On my production machine I use a dedicated (non-lvm) drive as boot (knoppmyth) and an LVM cluster (500 SATA, 320 SATA, 320 IDE) for all data. I have had to replace one of the 320's due to a drive failure (that is another story...).

The wiki post works fine to build a cluster. Make sure you follow it step by step and don't try to add more than one drive at a time to the cluster (you can go ahead and fdisk and format all at once if you want - will save time).

http://www.knoppmythwiki.org/index.php?page=LvmHowTo

This tells you how you can keep your data, scroll down to the Manual steps

I followed this, had data on a couple of drives and ended up not losing any