A Larger Hard Drive

For a while now I've been wanting to stick the extra 250 GB hard drive I had into our MythTV box. It's a little larger and notably faster than the old 200 GB drive we're using now. It wasn't as easy as I think it should have been, though.

I'm really just a Linux noob still, so I tried to find some help with this, and the Hard Disk Upgrade Mini How-To seemed like just the ticket. The instructions were easy enough to follow, though I had to figure out how to use an ext3 filesystem rather than the default ext2. (Basically, just enable journaling.) I wanted to use ext3 because the journal would keep file system checks short in case of crashes and is supposed to deal better with large files--like MythTV creates.

That all went fine. Copying 200 GB of data to the new 250 GB disk took quite a while; about two hours, I think.

I was left a little confused when I read step nine, prepare LILO to boot the new disk. LILO is supposed to get updated to boot from the new disk (/dev/hdc) rather than the old one (/dev/hda). But I was confused about why--after removing the old disk, doesn't the new one become hda? Regardless, I followed the instructions... surely a How-To like this has been used and written by others smarter than me.

Of course, that wasn't the case. Booting with the new drive threw a number of errors and resulted in a kernel panic. I had to boot into single-user mode, mount the disk, undo the changes I made to LILO so it again pointed to /dev/hda. Save, reboot, and it works.

Sort of. There's no sound anymore. Why? I have no idea. I don't see what I could have changed that affected audio. Some searching got me to the ALSA SB Live set up instructions, which told me to use modprobe, and that got it working. Will it still work after a reboot? I don't know.

As time goes on, I wonder more and more if I shouldn't have just bought a TiVo.