New Motherboard migration


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My A8N32 SLI Asus motherboard just took a dump on me. I need a new motherboard. Does anyone here have any experience with moving all my drives (there's 10 of them) to a new motherboard without losing any of my data? What's the safest way to do this without losing anything? I thought maybe rebuild a new machine with only the flash drive in, then add the parity drive and go one at a time. I think I have to maintain the same order of drives in the new box as they were in the old box (channel-wise). But if I get a totally new mobo with a different channel layout would this still be possible?

Any help is much appreciated.

 

thanks!

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Just replace the motherboard and keep everything else the same. You'll have to figure out which drive is parity and then assign all of the data disks to data slots and parity to parity. Once the array is up you can check parity and then rearrange the data disks to their original order.

 

 

EDIT: Don't forget to configure the BIOS on the new board.

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When you boot up with the new mobo installed, the array will be stopped because the drives will have been moved.  Assign the drives, especially the parity.  Once you have the drives assigned then the balls should be green and you can start up the array.  I've changed motherboards several times, each time I've been on the edge of my seat when getting the drives re-assigned, but it's worked perfectly every time. 

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FYI, the original drive serial number will show in italics for each slot making it fairly easy to match them back up. Once you re-assign the drives then they will all have green balls and be ready to go.

 

If you were running 5.0b6 then the drives should stay assigned and the array will likely start on boot as if nothing happened.

 

Peter

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Hey guys, I'm happy to report a successful migration! However I am having an issue that existed before I even moved the drives to a new motherboard. One of my disk's has a red circle next to it and it doesn't look like I can do anything to repair this. Even when I spin the drive down. Any help is much appreciated.

 

disk1.jpg

 

thanks!

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Thank you, I will get that information. What if I have another 2 TB backup drive. Can I power down the box, put the new drive in and have it rebuild? I'm assuming this won't work because the current drive is red, this indicates it's not part of the array?

 

thanks!

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Take note of the serial number, make sure you remove the correct drive, put the new one in, boot back up, and the array will not automatically start, it will ask you to confirm that you want to rebuild the drive on the new blank disk. Red means the virtual drive is available and part of the array, but the physical drive isn't being read or written to because it's been marked as failed. Right now all the drive data is being recreated on the fly from the rest of the drives, so if you have another failure before you replace and fully rebuild the disk, you will lose the data on both failed drives.

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The red ball indicates that the drive has failed and unRAID has dropped it from the array - the physical drive, not the disk or contents. unRAID is simulating the disk and running degraded at this time. It could be the disk itself or the hardware connecting the disk. Either way, you need to fix the problem and then rebuild the simulated data back onto the physical drive.

 

At this point, I would suggest you install that spare drive and see if you can rebuild the data onto it. The sooner you get the drives all green again the sooner you are protected against another drive failure. Then, you can figure out what's up with that current drive. If the rebuild fails then that points to the connecting hardware being suspect.

 

Peter

 

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Thank you! I have a new drive in there currently rebuilding, going to take about 2000 minutes. Hopefully things go smoothly. They really need to have an updated firmware where I can setup email traps for things like this. I am sure this can be done from a mod, but I really don't want to mod.

 

thanks again, people!

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