Hi all 

I am new to the unRAID experience, started out with 3 X 400 GB disk. that i have now upgraded with 1 TB disks instead. all good this far.

I have an extra slot the enclosure i wanted to utilize it by adding an additional 1 TB Disk trouble is I do not get the option to expand with the extra disk I can replace any of the disks in the array with the added disk.

I am as you might guess a newbie to command prompt interface and all of this have been done via the web interface.

I am running unRaid 5-rc10 with plex on top.

all help are greatly appreciated thanks in advance

Sorry if this is the wrong placing for this post.

 

Thanks in advance

You might want to take a look at this.

 

http://lime-technology.com/wiki/index.php/FAQ#What_is_the_difference_between_the_unRAID_licenses.3F

 

Do you have the free license?

Free license only let you use 3 disks total.

Thanks for the fast reply!!! 

 

this will present a challenge since the unRaid install have been made on a CF card  with a reader attached as a ide disk!

how to find the GUID for the Compac Flash I have no clue help will be appreciated!

 

Thanks in advance.

No GUID on CF cards... (from what I understand) need to use a USB FLASH (thumb) drive for the GUID to register above the free license version.

 

  For more information related to CF vs GUID and running unRAID from CF you can look here:

 

  http://lime-technology.com/forum/index.php?topic=5934.msg56385#msg56385

 

  and

 

  http://lime-technology.com/forum/index.php?topic=3846.msg34151;topicseen#msg34151

 

  There are also internal USB adapters if you need to keep the boot device inside your computer for some reason, as long as your BIOS supports USB boot.  Supposing you did not opt for CF boot due to USB boot not being an option.

 

  Another alternate boot option if your BIOS does not support USB boot is to first boot with one of the available linux boot utilities which in turn can then boot from a USB device.  I have a few REALLY old test machines that have NO USB boot options in BIOS, so I boot a linux boot configuration utility from CD-ROM that then boots unRAID from my USB flash.  Works great, just sad to need a CD-ROM drive eating up space and resources...  you could do the same thing with the linux boot on CF or follow the other methods listed in the above links.  There are many possible ways to do it.  But you will need to add a USB flash drive with a valid GUID.  I would suggest you look at the current list of suggested devices, (I use various SANDISK flash drives and have not had any problem with any of them to date.  I just buy the cheap SANDISK at the time, and possibly larger to get a good price/byte ratio...  Then I also use the FLASH to make back-ups of various install files and batch files I use when I build new machines...  All conveniently available from the unRAID server!)

 

 

 

   

I have a few REALLY old test machines that have NO USB boot options in BIOS

 

Nah!  If they were REALLY old (like 15 years), they wouldn't have any USB ports!

  hmm... I never even thought about trying my old 386 (or older) machines... I just assumed the kernel would not run on them.  Should I start a whole new set of tests on pre-USB hardware?  :-)  of course I would then be stuck to FREE versions of unRAID on that hardware, but it could be fun to try out.

 

  I was just rather depressed some time back when I broke out some of my old USB 1.0 capable hardware hoping to boot from USB and not being able to, so I had to find a work-around.

 

  Of course since then I have learned that USB booting is still FAR from being a very consistent user experience even on NEW hardware... :-(  unRAID seems to be ahead of the other boot options however for boot compatibility!  :-)  It is often the first thing I try when attempting to enable USB boot on new or old hardware...

 

 

 

 

There are also internal USB adapters if you need to keep the boot device inside your computer for some reason, as long as your BIOS supports USB boot.

 

My motherboard only had the USB 10-pin headers, not usable internal USB ports ... so I bought one of these and am using just one of the two to keep my USB boot drive internal to the case.  At least that way, it's a lot harder to kick it or something. 

 

www.amazon.com/Belkin-Dual-Port-Motherboard-Adapter-10-Pin/dp/B00004Z5NH/

 

HTH

  hmm... I never even thought about trying my old 386 (or older) machines... I just assumed the kernel would not run on them.  Should I start a whole new set of tests on pre-USB hardware?  :-)  of course I would then be stuck to FREE versions of unRAID on that hardware, but it could be fun to try out.

 

  I was just rather depressed some time back when I broke out some of my old USB 1.0 capable hardware hoping to boot from USB and not being able to, so I had to find a work-around.

 

  Of course since then I have learned that USB booting is still FAR from being a very consistent user experience even on NEW hardware... :-(  unRAID seems to be ahead of the other boot options however for boot compatibility!  :-)  It is often the first thing I try when attempting to enable USB boot on new or old hardware...

you can boot from CD or a partition on a hard drive i.e. another fat partition on the cache drive.

I was exploring another option a while back of using grub4dos which can boot off a reiserfs system.  So that's possibility. If I remember correctly other people were using plop to boot a floppy capable of booting via usb.

 

 

In the past when my flash drive went bad.. just bad enough to not allow booting, but good enough to allow validation of emhttp's serial.  I booted from PXE on another machine.

  I use PLOP for my CD-ROM booting, on my machines that do not support USB booting.  pretty much any device that will boot on the computer should be able to be used to boot a Linux boot loader which could then allow the subsequent boot of the USB FLASH drive for unRAID.

 

  I had thought of using a floppy, and would have gone that way if I had really needed the IDE interface for another hard drive on those machines.  But the main purposes for the machines was for testing, and then for another archival storage location.  One BIG advantage of using the floppy instead of the CD-ROM to boot with would be the ease of configuring the boot options and making tweeks as needed.  A bit of a pain really on CD-ROM...  :-)

 

  I guess I could also add a USB port to an older computer without a USB port already, had not thought of that either...  :-)

 

  I must say I have LOVED unRAID for an easy way to make use of most hardware combinations to make a quick place to store additional back-ups.  Just make sure you do not forget about them, and do periodic NON-CORRECTING parity checks on them as you would do on a usually active unRAID system.