So I have (or had) a working MythTv system, going quite well, except for that is all I had was a 30 gig partition that I was storing everything on for recorded shows. So I ordered a 160 gig hard drive, came today, fdisk and mkfs'd it, worked well. So on the advice of linux savy friend i just copied the contents of the /myth partition over and then changed the fstab file to agree with this. Well, when I tried to reboot, Lilo won't even run... I looked at the fstab file by mountin the drive on another computer, and realized that it was trying to boot the drive twice, deleted the second referance to it being mounted at /mnt/hdb1 and tried again, nothing. Well I then just went back to my previously backed up fstab and tried that, it got one step farther (actually posts this time) but lilo still won't come up.
Remember this is after I had the drive working just fine initailly, I'm completely out of ideas and since my roommate and I have both become slightly dependent on Myth a quick response would be awesome. I would post the fstab file, but it's a long story, it's just very hard to get it to a computer with internet access.

-Chris

I have done exactly what you just described. I had an 80 gig hard drive with everything installed on it. I purchased a 300 gig and just installed it as a slave drive. I then copied over /myth from hda4 (I think that is what /myth was as default) to hdc1 (I think my DVD drive was hdb). I then edited fstab to mount hdc1 as the /myth drive and mount the old /myth to /myth2 (no reason to mount /myth2, but I may want to store things here at some future time). Everything works fine, so your process should be the same.

Now, here are a few things you may want to check.

1. Figure out a way to post your fstab here (maybe copy it to a floppy or a flash drive).
2. Make sure you have your new drives configured as a Master/Slave. The original drive with all the system software should be Master and the new /myth drive should be slave. You’ll have to set jumpers on the drive for this (check the manual that it came with if you aren’t familiar with this).
3. Make sure you have everything mounted correctly (file system, mount point, read/write). Just use the original fstab as a template and change the pertinent sections. All you should have to do is change the original /dev/hda4 to /dev/hdc1 with the mount point of /myth.

I'll try to post the fstab this afternoon if I can, otherwise I made sure the jumpers were set right (I worked in computer repair for two years), they show up in the bios as master/slave just fine and in the correct way. But why wouldn't Lilo even run is what I'm wondering?

-Chris

Ok I have my fstab file here it is:

# /etc/fstab: filesystem table.
#
# filesystem mountpoint type options dump pass
/dev/hda1 / ext3 defaults,errors=remount-ro 0 1
/dev/hda3 /cache auto defaults,auto 0 2
/dev/hdb1 /myth ext3 defaults,auto 0 2

proc /proc proc defaults 0 0
sysfs /sys sysfs defaults 0 0
/dev/fd0 /floppy vfat defaults,user,noauto,showexec,umask=022 0 0
/dev/cdrom /cdrom iso9660 defaults,ro,user,noexec,noauto 0 0
/dev/cdromhdc /cdromhdc iso9660 defaults,ro,user,noexec,noauto 0 0
# Added by KNOPPIX
/dev/hda2 none swap defaults 0 0

even with this, and the drive installed it won't boot, no Idea what's wrong here, help.

Just a stab in the dark but, jump into BIOS and make sure you didn't inadvertently make the new drive the master...

Did, and it's not

What happens if you unplug the new drive? (both power and data connections please). When you say it doesn't post are you really talking about the BIOS refusing to complete self check? Or are you talking about not loading the OS after that?

With the new drive out it does exactly the same thing excpet then says "boot failed: system halted", same thing with the old drive out, new drive in.

Ok, I think I'm just going back up my lircd.conf and lircrc files and reinstall if it doesn't work by tomorrow morning but please keep helping until then because I really really don't want to do this again

Bug snot. 8-(

- Install both drives
- Make sure the BIOS boot order is CD, primary master, ...
- Boot from the CD, when you get the splash hit enter
- When you get to the menu pick option 6 "Exit program to console prompt"
- Mount /dev/hda1 so you can poke around.
- See the following thread for isntructions on how to rerun lilo: http://mysettopbox.tv/phpBB2/viewtopic.php?t=741

Updated to correct for my faulty memory...

Please see the update instructions above.

Here is a copy of my working fstab:

# /etc/fstab: filesystem table.
#
# filesystem mountpoint type options dump pass
/dev/hda1 / ext3 defaults,errors=remount-ro 0 1
/dev/hda3 /cache auto defaults,auto 0 2
/dev/hda4 /myth2 auto defaults,auto 0 2
/dev/hdb1 /myth auto defaults,auto 0 2

proc /proc proc defaults 0 0
sysfs /sys sysfs defaults 0 0
/dev/fd0 /floppy vfat defaults,user,noauto,showexec,umask=022 0 0
/dev/cdrom /cdrom iso9660 defaults,ro,user,noexec,noauto 0 0
/dev/cdromhdc /cdromhdc iso9660 defaults,ro,user,noexec,noauto 0 0
# Added by KNOPPIX
/dev/hda2 none swap defaults 0 0


The only difference I can see is that I let it auto pick the file system type (I formated the new drive as ext3).

One other thing you could try is setting the jumpers on both drives to "Cable Select". I know it sounds odd, but I have run into a few computers whose bios freak out with drives jumpered as Master/Slave. Just make sure that the drive you want as Master is the last drive on the chain. Hope this helps.

Wait, isn't this the original setup? Something very basic is wrong here.

fstab does not come into play until the machine is halfway up.
First, the BIOS runs, does POST, then reads the MBR.
Then LILO runs.
Then the kernel starts.
Then the root partition is mounted. This is where fstab is first used.

I hope I understood your problem correctly.

What I'd do is go back to the original setup. Then put in the new drive and without changing anything, bring the system up. Then worry about changing fstab.

Barry

Yeah, that's the bit that led me to conclude that they'd hosed the boot record somehow and needed to reinstall lilo.