I have a problem with my mythtv box where I want to install another hard drive into the system. I realize that there is a way around this by using the Raid method however there might be another way round

what if there was another partition in hda2 which would link up to a folder such as /myth2. Then recording could be recorded here as well. But to do that and make mythtv believe that the files are still located in /myth we could use symbolic links to get access to them, this step could even be written as a job. this way installation of another hard drive would be easier and safer

So if anyone knows if this is possible or not then please tell me

Just mount the new drive under /myth or /myth/tv and use the new drive only for recordings.
There is NOT a way to tell MythTV to have multiple storage locations. That would be awesome if it could, but it can't. Hopefully somebody smart will add that someday. Then you could just tell MythTV to use a handful of storage locations, ideally with prioritization and intelligent moving of old shows. That way you could just add disks or network mounts and tell Myth to use them, and which to use for recording and which to use for archiving (i.e. record to the fastest drive, then after 3 days, or after it's been watched, move to secondary or tertiary locations). No more LVM, so no more risk of losing everything if one drive fails.
I think that's what you want, me too, but it isn't here yet.

well its good to know someone has the same problem, however I wanted mythtv to use both hard drives for recordings, hmm Im gonna go mess with some links and see what happens, you never know

What about LVM? (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lvm)

There's instructions here:
http://knoppmythwiki.org/index.php?page=LvmHowTo

i am thinking about LVM however does it format/delete the contents on the drive

SInce there's nothing on the new drive the trick is to set that up as LVM first, copy all the old content over, then add the old partition to the LVM volume, and extend you FS. You can do this with EXT3, and I think JFS supports this too.

There is in SVN head. It is called Storage Groups. If you can wait several months for 0.21 (or are willing to live on the bleeding edge and compile/run the latest source), it is much tidier.

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cool, good information peeps, I think i may do the LVM thing for now, however using yje idea from nigelpearson this could mean that we "could" use multiple servers for storage meaning that a multiple backend setup will not be needed

The storage groups seem like the way to go. Meanwhile, for a workaround now, you can use multiple drives in the /myth filesystem, as suggested before. Think of separate hard drives for:

/myth/tv
/myth/video
...

Put a 500G hard drive on each and separate your TV shows from your movies, etc. This was my plan before I learned of the new feature in SVN.

Now I plan to watch less TV until it's ready...

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You can also move the files manually and leave just a symlink in the /myth/tv directory. At one point I had a script to do this which I may even have posted. For this to work properly you should do any commercial cutting, transcoding or the like, before moving the files and make sure to check the "Delete follows symlinks" option in mythtv-setup under 1. General on the 3rd page.