[mythtv-users] Kernel Panic - SCSI & IDE

[Jeff Wormsley]

John Johnson wrote:
>> You should have room to do a quick backup of everything.
>> Make a place for the backups, unmount the boot partition, and dump a
>> compressed image of it to a backup file.
>>
>> mkdir -p /var/backups
>> umount /boot
>> dd if=/dev/sda1 | gzip -c >/var/backups/boot.image.gz
>>
>> Backup the root partition.
>> tar cvjf /var/backups/root_after_os_install.tar.gz --exclude '/var/
>> backups/*' /
>>     
Somewhat off topic, but what do you do with this tar if you want to 
restore it, especially to a different disk than it originally came from?

The reason I ask:  I struggled with HD noise on my myth box, so I 
decided to start over using a 4GB laptop drive that runs very quietly.  
I now have this system up and running nearly perfectly on this drive, 
with optical SPDIF, lirc, lcdproc, gizmo for my powermate, perfect 
1920x1080p xorg setup, and so on, using a smb mount to hold my 
video/audio storage on a separate 1.4TB file server.  It took a lot of 
work to get this going correctly.  However, because of the small size of 
the drive, I am running into problems with IOBOUND errors, that seem to 
be occurring because I have less than 20% free space on this tiny 
drive.  So, I am thinking I will have to go back to the 200GB drive I 
was using before to hold recordings, then transcode/archive them to the 
file server if there are any I want to keep.

To keep from having to set up everything once again, with all the time 
and work that implies, I'd like to somehow copy the working setup from 
the 4GB drive to the 200GB drive.  But how do I go about doing that?  I 
can use dd and tar to move the contents to the file server easily 
enough, but how do I take that and put it on the 200GB drive?  And once 
I do, what will the 200GB drive look like?  Will it have the same 
partition table as the 4GB drive, with 196GB free space, that I can just 
partition and mount as /recordings?  Can I resize the partitions in some 
way to allow the OS more space?

Or am I stuck recreating this system from scratch yet again?  Well, 
partly: I know I can copy /etc and ~mythtv to preserve my conf files, 
.asoundrc and lirc config files.

TIA,
  Jeff.