Hi everyone,

I am planning a major hardware upgrade and am looking for strategies. The following is what is getting replaced:

MoBo: Asus A8V > Biostar TForce 550 SE
Proc: AMD Athlon 64 3700 > AMD Athlon 64 X2 6000
Mem: 2 x 512 corsair > 4 x 1GB DDR2 800
Video: XFX AGP geforce 5200 > XFX PCI-E 8500GT 256MB/500Mhz

This stuff is staying the same:

Coax: 2 x Wintv PVR-250
DVB: 2 x pcHDtv 5500
Optical: 2 x NEC DVD-RW ND-3550A
HDs: 2 x 250GB SATA Maxtor SL250SO
Case, IRblaster, and PS too

The HDs are LVM'd and I have a 500Gb drive that I would like to add.

It is imperative that I keep all my content and config.
I am running R5F27

Some questions:

1) Can I Backup, Swap hardware, then act like I am doing an upgrade or will that fail since the knoppmyth version is the same?
2) The old mobo has 2 sata ports, the new one has 4. Does the way my two drives are plugged in affect the installers ability to see the LVM? In an LVM setup, is the MBR part of the vg, or is it on only one of the two drives outside the vg?
3) Since the graphics cards are both NV based, do I have a chance at keeping the same xorg.conf?

TIA!

Sweet merciless Cthulu! Why are you putting that much horsepower in a PVR box? It already has plenty unless it has a different primary job like being a gaming rig.

_Definitely_ do the backup before you start, as you would for an upgrade, but after the hardware change, try booting without doing an upgrade. It may very well just work. The hardware detection scripts are pretty good about discovering new components.

As for "upgrading" to the same version, yes that works just fine. It's actually the recommended recovery method for any number of common ways that people screw up their machines. I've upgraded, downgraded, sidegraded, samegraded, so many times you'd be hard pressed to count them all. See the R5F27 Hints for much, much more info on this.

Happily LVM uses the volume labels, which don't change even if you get a different order on the SATA ports, so you're golden there. The main thing is to get your root partition on the primary master which will make life easier and avoid confusiion. I've mostly converted my /etc/fstab over to using labels, and hope to convince Dale and Cecil that this is the way to go in the future.

Finally, there's a very good chance that your X config will "just work", the real concern is whether the drivers supplied with R5F27 will support that card. A number of people have had problems with 8xxx series chipsets and had to manually upgrade their drivers.

Thanks TJC.

Main reasons for the upgrade is that I need a computer in another room and my current motherboard is loaded so I thought that I would try to overcome some current issues with my MythBox and transfer the other (still very good) bits to the new machine. I would not be doing this upgrade if I wasn't adding another machine in the house. On my mythbox, I am out of disk space and sata ports, I dont have any place for a sound card with optical out, and I can't get it to boot with all four cards in it (although this might be a PS issue). Aside from that, I want to overcome:

- HD playback stuttering if transcoding at the same time
- I want to try and run HD without XVMC
- I want to to run 1080p content (in the future)
- I want to move from VGA to HDMI (reason for the video card change)

Sure would be nice if it works without any installation ...

I should have searched for 8xxx series problems before buying this card ... I was always under the impression that the reason people used the 5xxx series cards was because most of them were fanless, not because of driver issues.

Once I get going on this (I am still waiting for the MB), I will report back on the outcome.

thanks again!

jmacmythtv
Why don't you try this before you rip your machine apart and post back your results to that posting
http://knoppmyth.net/phpBB2/viewtopic.php?t=16990
TVBox

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TVBox
LinHES R8.6.1

I have an Athlon 3200, 2gb RAM, and 6200 graphics card and I'm pretty sure I can watch HD and transcode one show at the same time. Right now I'm using VGA but for most of the last year I've been using DVI->HDMI. If both your machines are going to be on at the same time, the other machine can do the transcoding. Anyways, you can easily set transcoding to only take place in the overnight hours.

I was under the impression the XvMC is what made the graphics card do the work. If you don't want to monkey with it, I'm thinking you can just get a mobo with built-in DVI or HDMI and use the onboard graphics card, especially with the amount of RAM you're looking at. This should also cut the power usage and noise as well.

I'm looking at your specs again... man that's a lotta juice

I'm guessing his processor is single core at the moment and that won't handle playback and transcoding at the same time very well at all where as a dual core chip does this pretty well.

I can see your desire to upgrade the Motherboard (more ports) and the processor (more power!) but I can't fathom a need for more than 2 GB of RAM in a PVR box. I'd also recommend saving a few bucks and dropping down to a more tried and true video card from the 6xxx or 7xxx series.

Martian

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ABIT NF-M2 nView | Athlon 64 X2 3800+ | 2GB DDR2 800 | HDHomerun | GeForce 6150 (onboard) | WD 640 GB SATA HD | DVD-RW (sata) | StreamZap IR receiver with Logitech Harmony remote

Vizio 37" LCD HDTV (1080p)

Thanks everybody! All great and valuable suggestions that I should have asked for before buying the equipment!
-Yes, current processor is single core.

-I was aware the different CPU utilization settings for tcoding - even on low, I got stuttering. My workaround - which I want to avoid with the new system - was to do as suggested and schedule these jobs in off-hours.

- I should also mention that this new system will be a FE and BE for itself and the old box in another room (Not sure if that helps justify much:)

- More bad news on my hardware selection: The northbridge on the MOBO has a little wizzing 32mm fan that I missed in the images and the x2-6000 has a TDP of 125W! (Versus about 70W for the old processor). This means I am going to have to revisit the cooling setup in a substantial way (The old box has only one 12cm fan running at 900rpm on a huge zalman heatsink - and holds ~52C when heavily loaded.

Anyway, it is all here now ... I will give her a go this weekend and surely be back with lots of questions...

tks!

I've found this site quite helpful for researching colling hardware that doesn't provide that "Jet Engine in the Living Room" feel.

http://www.silentpcreview.com/

Martian

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ABIT NF-M2 nView | Athlon 64 X2 3800+ | 2GB DDR2 800 | HDHomerun | GeForce 6150 (onboard) | WD 640 GB SATA HD | DVD-RW (sata) | StreamZap IR receiver with Logitech Harmony remote

Vizio 37" LCD HDTV (1080p)

Thanks Martian ... I've actually had tabs on that site open all week! I picked my PS and Old CPU cooler based on their recs...

Ok, so I decided to give this a go this weekend and manage to nicely botch the migration:)

The simple hardware swap did not work. The network would not come up and the machine would boot to a black screen and hang.

So I tried upgrading but accidentally grabbed an R5F1 disk On first HD boot, I had the same black screen hang.

So I redid the manual upgrade with the right version R5F27. This gave me the INIT error associated with NV driver problems. I swapped vesa in for nvidia in xorg.conf and was able to get the gui going. However, once the setup dialogs finished I got the same INIT errors - it had changed my xorg.conf back to NV.

So after a little searching, I decide to force install 9755 - this has got me back to the hung black screen. Due to the INIT problems, the upgrade didn't seem to finish - the user that I created does not exist (so I can't shell in remotely). Last thing that I will add is that lsmod | grep nvidia doesn't show anything ...

Not sure where to go from here ... I'm thinking re-do my upgrade and then try to install the most recent NV drivers using their installer??

Any thoughts and help much appreciated!

tia!

Figured out my issues and posted in another thread:

http://knoppmyth.net/phpBB2/viewtopic.p ... 251#107251

A couple of updates:

Most things running well now.

- I would not recommend this cpu - it has a tdp of 125W and I am having problems with cooling when I keep my fans low - the MOBO has shut the box down on a couple of occasions (70C). I might try underclocking it and reducing voltage

- DVI cable works now, although when I switch to console, I have to power off the monitor to get it to sync

- Ram slot closest to the cpu interferes with the Zalman cpu cooler I installed. I pulled out 2G for another machine.

- HD playback is no different with or without xvmc enabled. I would report CPU use but I can't quite figure out how TOP is doing its calcs. At times it shows xorg using 90+% but also shows 36% idle. Not sure how it deals with dual cores?? Regardless, no maxing out anymore, even with aggressive concurrent comflagging.