I finally got MYTHTV to work after months of playing arround with it, now I am really afraid that all the days of work I've put into it go to waste if my box crashes. is there any way of imaging the hard drive with a program like norton ghost? so that if it crashes I can just restore it with a restoration CD?

Thanks in advance.

Not sure if any of the current commercial imaging software handles ext2/3, though they probably do. But I don't bother, linux has just the tool you need: dd. If you've got a USB hard drive, it's simple as pie.

To image:
dd if=/dev/hda1 of=/mnt/usb/myth.hda1.img bs=1k

To restore:

dd if=/mnt/usb/myth.hda1.img of=/dev/hda1

This assumes, of course, that your hard drive is hda1 and that the usb drive is mounted on /mnt/usb.

The advantage of using an external hard drive is that you don't have to worry about splitting CDs and all that ridiculous stuff, and if you need to restore a wiped system, you don't even need a full install. Just throw in slax or another tiny liveCD and restore from there.

If you replace hard drives with different sizes, you may run into issues but these can usually be worked around with clever partitioning tricks, if necessary.

Just my .02

Thank a lot for your help I will certainly try that, and I will also try norton... What I like about ghost is that it actually makes bootable restoration CDs and it allows you to upgrade the Hard Drive of your machine since it will format the hard drive and restore it regardless of capacity... I am not sure if, like you said, it is compatible with ext2/3

again... Thanks a lot for your help.

http://www.drive-image.com/ Ive used it before and it worked fine.

Search here and go to http://www.mondorescue.org. I use that before every upgrade to make a backup image of my master myth box on a dvd (I exclude the /myth directory so it fits on one dvd). It takes a little reading to understand it, but it's free and it works well. Just write down the command line that you use to do the backup so you'll don't have to read the documentation all over again the next time. I've had to use the restore a couple times due to messed up upgrades. Definitely worth the effort to learn.


Steve

Thanks a lot to all of you for your suggestions, I will give them a try.