I have a R5F27 installation working on an aging computer that is threatening catastrophic failure, though probably not immediately. I picked up a new box and I'd like to install R6.

So my question is how do I move my R5F27 database on computer A over to computer B running R6?

The painful route is to install R5F27 on computer B, copy the shows, and replace the db with the one from computer A. Once everything is up and working upgrade to R5.5, fix any issues that upgrading has caused and upgrade again to R6 and again fix any issues.

That seems painful at best. It seems like there should be a less painful mechanism to migrate to new hardware.

At the very least R5.5. and R6 should have existing scripts to upgrade the db. If I knew where those were, at the very least, I could move the R5F27 db, run the upgrade_db scripts, then remove the now non-existent tuner card and re-add the one that's actually physically attached to the computer. Probably even better would be to just replace the tables in the R6 installation db that contain the history and schedule from Computer A.

This assumes that the shows are not bound to a tuner in the db, which makes sense. It also assumes that the R5.5 script can be run outside of the context of a R5.5 installation.

So I guess my questions are:
Is there a better way?
Is there anything wrong with my proposed approach?
Where are the db upgrade scripts (hopefully they will be in a language I speak)?
Does anyone know of any previous work in this regard so I'm not reinventing the wheel?

Thanks for any help or suggestions,
Nephlm

There are tons of ways of doing accomplishing the upgrade; there's probably a different "best way" recommended by everyone who's ever done an upgrade. Here's the general outline I'd follow.

Caveat:My knowledge does NOT yet extend into the R6 line, so I'm good through R5.5; R6 may be the same, but I'm not there yet. I'm also assuming you're running a fairly stock system.

If you're saving the hard drive from the old box, run a backup from the knoppmyth menu, then pop the drive in the new system and run an "upgrade" from whatever version you want to install. -- not too painful. The upgrade handles the schema changes and restores the backup into the new version's DB.

If you want to move to a new hard drive too,

1. run the backup,
2. Connect both drives in the same system. (new, old, or another pc altogether, it doesn't matter as long as they're both visible)
3. Partition the new drive; there should be 3: OS, Swap, and /myth in that order. The first and 3rd are "linux" the 2nd is "linux swap"
4. Make the first two sizes the same as on the old drive; you can make them bigger if you choose, but there's really no need.
5. Make the third fill the rest of the drive; i.e. as big as possible.
6. Format and mount the new drives 3rd partition. (ext3, xfs, or any other; search the forum and wiki for pros/cons of each filesystem.)
7. Copy everything from the old drives 3rd partition to the new drive's 3rd partition. (I reco you search the forum for rsync if you're not sure about this step.)
8. You can ignore the first and second partitions.
9. Put the new drive in the new system; boot from the install CD, and choose "auto upgrade"

Basically the DB Backup and the Shows are all stored on the 3rd partition, so most of the work is in getting the shows and backup to the new drive.

Everyone has their own method. See this post where I asked the same question. Read tjc's reply which is what I successfully did.

The wildcard is R6... my only experience with it has been on a frontend to an R5.5 MBE. Since you already have your original HDD (i.e. your shows, live system, etc.), you don't have anything to lose but your time if you try it on R6. If you're not that daring, give it a try but using R5.5 and wait to update to R6 in the near future.

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Retired KM user (R4 - R6.04); friend to LH users.

I did an upgrade, but the auto upgrade scripts would not work for me, they seemed to bring too many of the old files across.

I basically just rsync'd /myth to the new drive and manually imported the database. So far I haven't really used any of the old config files as they just didn't seem to work with R6. Once manually importing the database, run mythtv-setup from the frontend and it will recognise that the schema needs updating and attempt to do so.

If you have troubles with the database schema update (I did on some attempts, not all) try the following.


I'm happily running R6 and have been for a couple of weeks. You'll need to grab the mplayer-resumer script and the thumbnail generator script (although the thumbnail generator locks up my box for some reason, haven't had time to debug).

Leon

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DRM 'manages access' in the same way that jail 'manages freedom.'
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