Greetings Knoppmyth Experts,

I just set up my backend server for MythTV everything is working great so far. I just did the basic auto installation running through the setup screens pretty quickly but I might not have optimized my hardware storage for my computer. As I said, everything is running seemlessly right now so, hopefully, I don't have to reinstall and drop my recordings so far. So here is my question:

My machine has 3 internal hard drives but I think that the auto install is only making use of one of them. I all want to do is take the other two hard drives and add them to the space for my recordings ...

Can somebody step me through how to safely add my additional drives to the correct partition or is this possible without reformatting things.

Thanks in advance,
Wally Atkins

Best bet is following the LVM howto on wiki.

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

Can do it via the script or manual way.

Since I have already installed things and have my machine up and running what is the best way to accomplish this? Insert the install CD and try to do an "upgrade"? Then follow the guides that you suggested?

Did you read the howto? It does state how one can you this...

I tried the steps from the Standard Automated LVM Setup and when I did the umount of /myth it told me that the drive is busy ... which makes sense. So I wasn't quite sure how to get around this and the first thought that I had was it needs to be done while things were being done from the install disk ... am I not on the right track here?

Yes you are... Don't mean to be hard on you, but if you'd have give the error in the first place, you'd be further along. Most likely you need to stop the backend first.

_________________
cesman

When the source is open, the possibilities are endless!

What is the most graceful way to shutdown the backend? I hate to sound like a complete n00b but so far I've had a bit of a rough intro into getting my Myth box up and running and I don't want to kill what I have going right now ...

Any pointers you can give would be great.

Just to make sure ... I have three hard drives

- 80GB [hda1, hda2, hda3]
- 80GB [hdb1]
- 200GB [hdd1]

When using:

Do I add both drives at the same time?

Or one at a time?

In rough outline:

- Stop the myth daemons.

- Back up your /myth (Just make a tar ball of the whole thing and stash it somewhere.)

- Do the create with all three partitions you'll be using. (Ignore any whining about hda4)

- Format that new volume (ext3 is easy)

- Mount it as /myth (Should be just "mount /myth" since the script updates your /etc/fstab.)

- Restore the backup onto it.

- Restart your daemons or just reboot.

When I attempt to format the drive using the line:

I get an error that says that it cannot find the special device /dev/vg/myth
Also I cannot mount /myth afterwards ... I am obviously doing something wrong. Where is the best place to start looking for where I made a wrong step?

What does vgscan show?

OK, how about pvscan and if that works pvdisplay? Frankly it sounds like you're failing very early in the game. Did you partition those other drives? Generally they should just be one big partition.

PVSCAN and PVDISPLAY didn't show me anything either. Here's a quick rundown on my scenario:

1. I can run the install CD of KnoppMyth (R5C7) and get it up and running every time ... that is to the point where it will utlize fully one of my hard drives and I can watch TV on my coputer monitor ... which is fine for now. Spitting it out to my TV will come later ... once I get the backing correctly configured.

2. I have not figured out how to setup LVM correctly so it will add my two additional drives to the /myth partition.

3. For some crazy reason I cannot get the Perl script to control my DirecTV receiver to work again ... (http://www.pdp8.net/directv/directv.shtml). It was working just fine and dandy and now I can't get it working at all. I could live with somewhat limited storage but not being able to change channels via MythTV is going to kill me.

I have re-installed KnoppMyth more times than I can count. Any suggestions on the best way to start so my drives will be fully utilized? Any pointers on how to diagnose what is going wrong with the serial port perl script? It tells me that it tries to initialize the port and stops after 4 timeouts.

Any suggestions are greatly appreciated!!!