OK, this may be impossible, but here goes:

I had a nice, customized and non-recently-backed-up knoppmyth install that I messed up the kernel for, so now it won't boot (tried to fix it for way too long today). So, I took the HDD upgrade opportunity and just installed a nice, new R5D1 install. My question is, is there any handy way to get all the settings of my old install (still have the HDD and it's mountable) into/onto my new install? Yes, there's a difference in the knoppmyth versions: I think the old one was R5B1... Knowing dangerously nothing about mysql dbs, I'm wondering if I can just swap out the settings.MYD/MYI/frm files from the old db...

Thanks.

I do not believe the settings table changed from R5B to R5D but i am not too sure....you could backup the R5D database and then import the R5B database and if it goes badly then put the R5D backup back.

I think it should work though.

Thanks, I'll try it. If anyone else is reading this, the broken version is R5B7, not 1...if it matters.

Cecil wrote up how to make a backup on a damaged disk image a while back. I think it may have even been made into a wiki page. http://www.knoppmythwiki.org/index.php? ... erRecovery

Not mentioned on that page is booting from the CD, mounting /dev/hda1 (or your equivalent) and then using chroot to make it your root, then mounting /myth and running a backup.

Thanks everyone. I'll look into that backup/recovery strategy, and I'll just plain back up more often... I know better. FYI: swapping out the entire /var/lib/mysql dir worked fine, and I haven't found a glitch yet (though admittedly, I haven't done everything yet). This carried over all the recording db entries, so I just copied over the /myth/tv dir and voila.