I currently have a 250gb SATA hard drive and IDE DVD burner. I am about out of disk space. I got a good deal on an PATA (IDE?) HD and want to add it to my system.

1) Will KM auto recognize the new disk or will I have to do some manual setup work?

2) How should I have the jumpers set?

3) I'm thinking of LVM, what kind of future headaches am I buying myself if I do this?

Thanks!

I have a LVM setup and it was not hard to convert following the directions here:

http://www.knoppmythwiki.org/index.php?page=LvmHowTo

Make sure you follow the "Manual LVM setup" steps since you have a existing system. Is your new hard drive bigger or smaller than the existing one? One of the LVM steps is to copy your /myth partition to the new drive before joining them via LVM. Also, make sure you enable DMA on the new hard drive before starting the copy (I found out he hard way since it took hours to do without it).

To answer your questions:

1. You will need to manually partition the hard drive. The directions are in the howto I linked you to.

2. My drives are set at cable select. Your best bet is to use the master setting for a single IDE drive setup

3. No future headaches for upgrading with LVM. I just had to run a script during my upgrade to R5F27 (recreate_lvm.sh) after the CD install / reboot.

Thanks for the reply.

My new HD (320gb) is larger than the old (250gb). Do I need to do anything special because of this? How do I enable DMA in this mixed SATA/PATA environment?

Future headaches I was thinking of were potential problems with "storage groups" in mythtv release .21.

I have to say, I was an early adopter of LVM for my Myth box and now I'm back OUT of LVM. My problem is that LVM makes the box more likely to fail and take out ALL of your recordings. If one of your LVM drives tanks, the whole array is borked.

My solution was to mount a large drive at the directory /myth/tv to hold my HDTV recordings, and another at /myth/video for my movies. My original disk at / (root) holds everything else. These partitions are not as flexible as turning your disks into one giant disk, but a single disk failure will only take out one segment of my viewing pleasure.

P.S. My system is mixed PATA/SATA and it "just works {TM}". I used hdparm to verify that DMA was enabled on the PATA drive (it was) and the SATA drive doesn't care about hdparm -- I think it's always using DMA by default.

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Nope, nothing special. I asked this since you might loose some recordings if it was smaller during the copy. I used webmin to make sure the DMA was turned on. Without it the copy was painfully slow without it.

If you want to hold out for the "Storage Groups" option in the next mythtv release, you could copy your videos in /myth/pretty to a NAS box (I use Freenas) and link them back too /myth/video using NFS. Then delete the recordings off the Myth box.

Well, I put the disk in last night. Decided not to go with lvm, I'm going to wait for storage groups. My 320gb disk should be very good for the time being. On my original 250gb disk, it turns out I had 169gb available for recordings. That 169gb will now fill up with movies and home movies, maybe mp3's. Here's what I did:

adding pata second hard drive to sata boot drive pc

- shutdown system,
- set jumper in "cable select" position (might be there already),
- attach cables (IDE and power),
- mount ide cable to second ide jack on mobo
(the IDE cable that attaches to my cdrom wouldn't reach the disk, so I installed a separate cable for the disk)
- boot, open xterm, login as root, check /dev (using ls command) for the disk (mine came up hda),
- cfdisk /dev/hda, write filesystem as linux,
- run hdparm -d /dev/hda? to check for dma, (in this setup it should be hda1)
- create directory for mount point, mount /dev/hda? /MOUNTDIR
- edit /etc/fstab, add line /dev/hda1 /myth/tv auto defaults,auto 0 3

Now here are my problems

- during boot I'm getting error messages about the disk. I'm at work at the moment, so I don't recall the exact wording (and the boot screen has a TON of overscan) but something about please run fschk. I know nothing about fschk
- Boot process then stops and gives me the option to enter root password to fix things or hit ctrl-D to continue. If I enter the root password I'm dumped to a command line prompt, if I press ctrl-D boot continues
- Myth boots up properly, however, Watch TV no longer works. If I select Watch TV the screen flashes and goes back to the Mythtv menu, hangs for about 20 (?) seconds, then responds to my keyboard again, but loses its connection to the backend.

HELP!

Well I fixed watching live TV, the write permissions on /myth/tv changed to rwxr-xr-x, so I put back the write permissions. ownership changed to root root also.