And we're running again, well maybe strolling or limping..

Here's an update to the situation.

I did have to rename some things in both grub.conf and /etc/fstab. Since I couldn't figure out how to get the MythDora 5 boot DVD to stop at the grub menu, I booted from a Ubunutu 6.06 LTS livecd and picked the option to boot from the 1st hard disk (I think that's what the menu item said) and it began to load MythDora from the new disk. It ran into some problems due to what I had excluded when I did the rsync copies though and somewhere there was a reference to the old LVM Volume Group name. So I rebooted to the Ubuntu livecd command prompt and used vgrename to change the name to the same one as the dead drive used. I again rebooted with the livecd and chose the option to boot from the hard disk. This time it got further into the boot process but there were still problems with missing directories (/var/run and /var/lock among others). I corrected as much of that as I could and restarted using the Ubuntu livecd. The system is now up and running with the new disk and should have recorded a show last night on the schedule. It's a good thing this was a down week for scheduled recordings.

So now I have a system that still won't boot on it's own. I'm guessing that the MBR is not what it should be since the drive will boot if I use a boot cd's grub to load it. The question is, how do I correct the MBR? On the chance that the copy of grub on the new hard disk was somehow damaged, I used yum to remove grub and reinstall it. I'm going to run another grub-install /dev/sda and see what that yields.