[mythtv-users] transcode?

[Brian Wood]

On Apr 20, 2008, at 1:42 PM, steve wrote:

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> Brian Wood wrote:
>
> | Hard drives are pretty cheap these days :-)
>
> steve is saving pennies for a pair of Iphones, economic stimulus where
> are you?????? may 9 isnt coming fast enough lol.  .......but.......  
> If I
> were to take say a spare HD out of a dead IBM netvista (junk) 80 gig,
> what do I have to do just format it in fdisk, switch the jumpers to
> slave and will the OS recognize it so I can use it?  new territory for
> me here...

If you have one drive strapped as master (or "cable select") you can  
install a second drive on the same port, assuming your cable has a  
total of three connectors (one for the mobo). The second drive should  
be cable select if that's what the other one is, otherwise make it the  
slave.

Fdisk is used to partition the drive. By default a new partition will  
be of type 83, which is probably what you want.

You then format the new partition. mke2fs will create an ext2  
filesystem, ass "-j" if you want to create a ext3 filesystem (which is  
really just ext2 with journaling).

The new partition should be detected at boot, you can mount it  
wherever you like. If oyu want it automatically mounted at boot you  
need to add an entry to /etc/fstab.

So - partition, format, mount.

That's the basics, there are lots of places to find more detailed info.

An 80GB drive will hold about 35 hours of PVR type MEPG2, twice that  
if you transcode to mpeg4.

beww