HELP! Motherboard Died


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Hey guys.  I built my first Unraid server a few years ago and gave it to my brother when I decided to upgrade.  Well about a week ago his stopped working.  He claimed he smelled burning plastic.  After a days worth of digging over voice chat, we finally got the motherboard out and found the back of it was scorched!  UHG.

 

As popular as this motherboard was when I bought it, I can't find it again ANYWHERE.  The motherboard is an ASRock Rack E3C224-4L.  We have an Intel Xeon E3-1200 CPU installed (socket is LGA 1150), along with 32gb DDR3-1600 ECC RAM.  I have a controller card (PCIe-16 slot) and expansion card (PCIe-16x slot) and an old Hauppauge TV Tuner card in an old PCI slot.  The onboard USB connector has the Unraid flash drive in it.

 

So as I said, I can't find a replacement motherboard.  I found a site I never heard of (PriceBlaze) who offered it.  I bought it, and a week has gone by with no status updates.  Then today I get an email from them saying that they had to cancel the order because they couldn't get it in.  Another option is from ANOTHER unknown site called Tech4Drive.  I don't know if I trust these sites.  They're not BIG names like Amazon, Newegg, Microcenter.  But, to avoid another cancellation, I attempted to contact Tech4Drive for confirmation they have it in stock before I buy.  Still waiting to hear back.

 

So moving on to what may be an even bigger ordeal... complete hardware replacement.  As far as we can tell, the only dead part was the motherboard.  So we're just looking to replace that for now.  The CPU, RAM, and everything else seems to be ok.  So I'm on Newegg looking for a compatible replacement.  They only have 4 options that support the CPU/RAM, and only 1 really seems to fit our needs as far as expansion slots.  The seller (not Newegg?) is in China, but offers free expedited FedEx shipping.  So I can get it in about 3-5 days for $99, not bad.  The bad part, I don't know how Unraid will handle it.  

 

Thus brings my questions:

  • Will Unraid's license still function if used on a new motherboard?
  • If not, is there a way to transfer the license without having to buy a new one?
  • If getting a new license is required, will that result in him losing all the data currently on all his drives?  He really can't afford this, as it has his only copies of photos (this was a backup server after all).
  • If licensing is not an issue, will getting completely new hardware cause any unforeseen headaches?  I'm already aware we'll have to navigate the BIOS and enable/disable things, etc.  But it should be as simple as dropping in place right?

 

Thanks guys for this awesome software and any support you may have to offer.  I've not made any purchases yet, so I'm definitely still open to suggestions.  If you can find a place selling our specific motherboard, I think that would be the most ideal.  If anybody can think of a better replacement option, let me know that too!  For reference, here is the one from China I'm looking at.

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14 minutes ago, hansolo77 said:

Will Unraid's license still function if used on a new motherboard?

Yes.  License is tied to the USB flash drive not any other hardware.

 

15 minutes ago, hansolo77 said:

f licensing is not an issue, will getting completely new hardware cause any unforeseen headaches? 

Unless you are running VMs with hardware passed through, a change of hardware is fairly trivial.  If you do have VMs with passed through hardware, you will ikely need to do some VM reconfiguration.  Also, if you have dual-parity make sure to note the current drive slots in the array for all the disks.

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Cool.  We're not having any issues with those.  He's not using VM's (yet).  We also only have the 1 parity drive right now.  Thanks for the quick response.

Really unless you are doing a new UnRAID array configuration, not necessary, disk slots don’t really matter either as disks are tracked in UnRAID by serial number.


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