TJC's first rule of computer repair/upgrade/... never put the cover back on before you doublecheck and test everything. Otherwise you're begging for an attack from Murphy and all his little gremlins... Been there, done that, paid the full price.

OK, so after a whole week of frustration I finally have my new 250 GB drive installed. Thanks for all the help everyone gave. It turns out I didn't need to repair lilo or make a rescue disk or do anything other than clone the disk. Copying the partitions using Partition Magic didn't do the trick because it did not copy the MBR. So I used Acronis True Image to clone the drive and it booted right up without any problems.

The only weird thing that happened was when I booted from the new drive the first time it started myth-setup and gave me the "Do you want to delete card settings, etc" screens. This might have happened because I did not have the coax plugged into my PVR250 the first time I booted up, because after a week of opening up computer cases, adding and removing drives, and crawling underneath my desk and behind my entertainment center I wanted to make sure it worked before I got everything hooked up.

I promised a detailed write-up once I got it working, but there is not much to write other than: install Acronis True Image, clone the old drive to the new one, reboot. It was really that simple. And if you want to do anything with floppies make sure you connect the power cable to your floppy drive, because there's nothing worse than spending 4-5 hours searching google for help on formatting floppies in Linux and feeling like a complete idiot when you can't do it only to open up your case and see a dangling power cable.

Aaron

Glad everything worked out. You must be using a newer version of Acronis than me (using 8.0 here) because mine actually has a warning screen saying that the boot loader will have to be repaired.

I also tried "DD" to copy the MBR from one disk to another with no avail. The only thing that has worked for me was repairing Lilo.