Happy new year all.

Here's my situation.
- I built a mythbox months ago with a 160 gb hard drive. I felt it wasn’t enough so I bought a new 320 gb hard drive.
- I want to replace the 160 gb with the 320 gb.
- And I want to stick the 160 gb drive in an independant external enclosure to use as a portable usb drive to bring recorded shows on the road easily.

What is the easiest way to essentially do an image copy of the 160 gb over to the 320 gb? I was considering an image backup from the 160 gb and dump onto the 320 gb using my normal backup technique (minid mondo growisofs). Will this work?
Alternately I was just going to follow the first half of the LVM tutorial on knoppmythwiki, but this only copies the /myth directory correct?

Any small tips greatly appreciated!

If you are happy to reinstall knoppmyth, but want to keep all of your media and database settings I would do this:
1. Do a mythbackup on the old drive.
2. Replace the old with the new drive and do an auto install.
3. Mount the old drive on the new system and copy the entire contents of the old /myth partition to the /myth partition on the new drive.
4. Do an auto-upgrade on the new drive.

I have followed this procedure a couple of times.

I've done a lot of customizing and such to my install. So I'd prefer to keep my current setup rather than start fresh. Is that possible?

See http://knoppmyth.net/phpBB2/viewtopic.php?t=16247

Thanks!
As usual, my answer already lies on this board. My search before was clearly inadequate.

dd seems like it will work great for me.

I've gone the dd route and it's real easy. I just don't like waiting for the thing without knowing it's progress. Know that it takes me over an hour to dd a 60G drive. Then you have to allocate the extra space on the larger drive. GParted live disk and a mouse is real easy to fix the extra space 'problem'.

Of course, you can use the gparted - live CD to do the entire process. 1. copy the partitions. 2. Enlarge the partition(s).
Creating a working MBR (Master Boot Record) can be a bit tricky. .. but using a "recovery technique" with either a boot diskette or a live CD (including your KM installation CD) will do the trick.

_________________
// Brian - Hardware:
ASUS P5P800 - P4 3Ghz, 500 GB PATA HD
ASUS P5K-V - P4 Core2 Duo, 500 GB SATA HD
Hauppauge PVR-350, IR Blaster, Comcast Digital Cable
http://tech.groups.yahoo.com/group/KnoppMyth/
KnoppMyth R5F27 >> R5.5

Hi,
Making a system clone BluesBrian's way is quite fast also ~ 5 minutes. Knoppix live cd will work too.

However one little thing to be aware, you will need to format the new myth partition for the larger file structure before you copy those recordings over. The command is in Cecil's pamphlet.

Mike

Actually, I cloned an entire 500 GB drive (by partition) .. it look about 8 hours! Cloning a partition with data would not require formatting, since you're getting a clean image of entire stucture. Making a partition (much) larger that contains existing data should go smoothly.

If you were to use gparted to create new partitions, then add data files with a file copy.. then you would need to format first. Note, also, that you would have to concern yourself with file & folder permissions. With an Image clone, you don't have those worries!

Hi,

Yes, to do a full clone of EVERYTHING could take a while. What I did was do a full install on the new drive as that set up the partitions and did the formatting. Then did a backup image of the original system partition to a usb drive using gparted. Once I had the backup image, swapped the drives and did a restore to the new drive. Boot with an install cd and re-run lilo -v on the new drive. Should now boot. Total time was ~ 5 - 10 minutes to be running from the new drive.

Make an edit to fstab to add the old myth partition and just copied (cp -a) the contents on to the new drive. That took a while on a 500gb > 1 tb move.

You want to umount the new myth partition and mount it on /mnt/hda3 or some place of choice. then mount your original /myth as normal. This way you can keep using the system until you have the time window to do the copy, lke over night. If you do the copy while it is busy it may missing some content and you would probably have to a do re- copy in an update mode (cp -au) . I had just let mine copy over night so don't really know how long it took, but it was considerable for the content.

Mike