hey all
im about to do a complete hardware change on my unraid server

going from amd ryzen 3900x 32gb ddr4 nvidia graphics card
to intel 245k ddr5 intel onboard graphics

is there anything i need to do? will unraid just seamlessly transition from one hardware to the next with no intervention?

also is there a way to erase the my unraid setup and start new without losing my files/unraid disks setup?
i was barely able to get unraid working when i first built it and i think i have messed with settings i shouldnt have changed but i dont know what they are and i was just changing everything that seemed related to my problems at first until i got it working - it would be good to start fresh

thank you

1 hour ago, f0d said:

is there anything i need to do? will unraid just seamlessly transition from one hardware to the next with no intervention?

If you use the same USB flash drive with your current Unraid license with new hardware (assuming you are keeping the same array/pool/cache disks and configuration) it is pretty much a seamless update with no changes. Unraid is not hardware specific in most cases. The only thing that could be a potential gotcha is VMs if you are doing any hardware passthrough with current hardware. That would need to be reconfigured with hardware changes.

I have changed hardware 4-5 times (motherboard, RAM, CPU, sometimes PSU) all with the same USB flash drive as it contains your Unraid configuration in the config folder.

1 hour ago, f0d said:

also is there a way to erase the my unraid setup and start new without losing my files/unraid disks setup?

As mentioned above, everything related to your current configuration is in the config folder on the root of your USB flash drive. The really important things to keep are the *.key (Unraid license) file, e.g Pro.key, and the super.dat which is your current disk configuration. With many configuration files, deleting the file from the config folder will cause it to be recreated with the defaults on the next reboot. Essentially, this is like starting over with that configuration. If you delete network.cfg, for example, you will get the default network configuration with DHCP enabled on the next reboot.

There are also subfolders in config for certain things like shares. This is where your current shares configuration is located. If you delete those files, you wont lose the shares, as they will be recreated with defaults on reboot; but, you will lose how those share are configured.

The quickest way to "start over" with the Unraid config is to make a backup copy of the current config folder, recreate the flash drive, and then copy your *.key file and super.dat from the backup back to the config folder. This will boot on the new hardware with the current license and disk configuration and everything else will be back to defaults. If you are using the same array/parity disks with the current data, shares will get recreated automatically with default settings as top level folders on array disks automatically result in shares of that name in Unraid. If there are other configurations you know are good and you don't want to redo them, you could copy those .cfg file back into the config folder as well.