[mythtvnz] Dying OS HDD - What would others do?

[tortise]

On 1/07/2012 11:25 p.m., Steve Hodge wrote:
> On Sun, Jul 1, 2012 at 8:52 PM, tortise <tortise at paradise.net.nz
> <mailto:tortise at paradise.net.nz>> wrote:
>
>     Option 2 I'm not sure where to start to do it this way however I
>     expect it could be done, can anyone give me a starting pointer? Or
>     should I do option 1?
>
>
> I'd try this first. I've done this in the past several times this way:
> 1. Put the new disk into the system
> 2. Boot from a live CD
> 3. Partition and format the new disk
> 4. Mount the new and the old partitions
> 5. Copy everything from the old disk to the new disk - you'll need to do
> this at the file level
> 6. Make sure the new disk is bootable. I'm using gentoo so I'm not sure
> exactly what you'll need to do here but it shouldn't be hard
>
> Cheers,
> Steve

Thanks Steve et al. To cap this off this is what I ended up doing (and 
have just got around to completing!). I ran up a new install of 
mythbuntu 10.04 on the 60GB SSD and copied the database across.  It did 
not work properly as an example the upcoming recordings were not listed 
and seemed lost.  I didn't really explore this in much detail, it might 
have been a mismatch of mythtv version or possibly it needed install of 
tv_grab_nz-py (probably not though) and I was also mindful that issues 
right up front is likely to flag other less obvious issues in the 
wind...  As I didn't want to spend too much time on this (risks of 
backend down when the next required recordings expected...etc) as there 
was quite a bit to update with customisations, upgrade various apps such 
as NVIDIA etc so I decided to buy a 120GB SSD to use instead as that 
should make it easy to copy what I have with the various customisations 
added....  I tried dd'ing the whole 120G HDD to the SSD however the 
partitions did not come through properly (as I'd expected) when it was 
subsequently mounted, and it would not boot either which seemed a risky 
and/ or long road for a rel. newb to continue down....

I then started again using Steve's steps 1-3, running up a new install 
of mythbuntu 10.04 on the 120G SSD drive, mainly for the partitions. I 
also installed all the updates, which was arguably a bit excessive 
however also reliable for updating grub and anything else unknown to me. 
(I'm not entirely sure where grub is, think its in the main partition 
however seems it did not matter this way) I took the backend down, 
removed the 120 HDD, and put the old and new SSD into a frontend, used 
fdisk -l to identify the partitions along with disk utility to confirm I 
was copying the right direction. I was surprised and delighted to find 
the partition sizes were an exact match. next:

sudo dd if=/dev/sdb1 of=/dev/sdc1 conv=noerror
224825344+0 records in
224825344+0 records out
115110576128 bytes (115 GB) copied, 4363.06 s, 26.4 MB/s

I cloned the main partition, shut down, installed the new SSD in the 
backend, fired it up...and bingo, seems fine.

Was it worth it - and should you do it too?  The HDD was likely to die 
at some stage, and made a vast amount of noise compared to the newer 
larger media drives which are largely silent in comparison. The SSD is 
of course essentially inaudible in the case (however to my surprise they 
are not always silent) Beyond these benefits applications in the backend 
start much faster (as does booting up which is infrequently done, mainly 
when new kernal images come down), as expected, and mythweb populates a 
litle faster, but not as much as I was hoping for. (Perfection would be 
no discernible delay)

In anticipation of some list advice the next contemplation seems to be 
upgrading from 0.23....  however 0.23 is working very well for me 
currently....  Merry Christmas to the list!