My trusty Proliant Gen 8 Microserver seems to have given up the ghost. I have no budget for replacement at this time, so my initial plan is probably to replace it with a 2nd hand Gen 10 for a like-for-like swap to make the transition seamless - my hope being that I can just put my existing drives and thumbstick in the new microserver, and it will be as if nothing has changed.

However, I have an old Windows 10 PC sitting under my desk, it's got an old but decent enough CPU and lots of space in the case, so I can feasibly turn it into a server, at least short-term, so I can at least access my files whilst I save for a long-term server replacement.

It was a long, long time ago that I set up my Unraid server, so I remember almost nothing of the initial setup process on the Proliant.

My questions are:

1) Do I just need to set the BIOS to boot from the thumb drive, completely bypassing Windows, or do I need to replace Windows with a different OS

2) Will Unraid recognise the drives still, based on serial numbers, and automatically know which is the parity and which are the data drives

3) Is there anything else that I need to do to ensure my data is safe (bear in mind my current server will not boot, so I can't access them at all) before I connect everything and power up

4) What other questions have I not thought to ask?

Thanks in advance for any help

16 hours ago, be4con said:

Do I just need to set the BIOS to boot from the thumb drive, completely bypassing Windows, or do I need to replace Windows with a different OS

Just need to boot from the flash drive

16 hours ago, be4con said:

Will Unraid recognise the drives still, based on serial numbers, and automatically know which is the parity and which are the data drives

It should