Okay, I'm about to upgrade another drive - I've got another 400Gig drive left and still have a few more 300s left to upgrade. Tom, should I do anything special other than just shutting down, swapping a drive, and powering back up? Any special precautions? Anyone else upgrade a drive under Beta4 yet?

Power down, swap drive, power up.  System should come up recognizing that a disk has been replaced (if this is not the case, email me).  Do not click Start yet.

 

From telnet, save copy of your super.dat file, e.g.,

 

  cp /boot/config/super.dat  /boot/config/super.bak

 

You could also do this by navigating to the config folder on the Flash share and drag a copy of super.dat to your desktop.

 

To be completely safe, go to the Shares page and set the Disk shares and User shares to "Don't export" or "Export read-only".  After upgrade has completed you can restore your export settings.  Now click Start to begin the upgrade.

 

The super.dat file is a 4096-byte binary file that holds the 'real-time' array configuration.  If the upgrade fails for some reason, for example, one of the "other" drives happens to fail while you're upgrading, you can put the original disk back, restore the super.dat file and be back to where you were before.

 

If after you Start, if any drive appears 'unformatted' do not click Format, instead send me an email.

10-4, will do! Well, maybe not tonight but this weekend most likely I'll report back one way or the other as soon as I've done it.

I powered down, and instead of swapping drive I have added another one, on a different SATA port.

As it powered up it started a parity check.

I stopped it, went to the properties tab and changed drive 2 to the new drive I inserted.

Have I permanently damaged my chances of restoring the drive now?

I just upgraded a 500gb to a 750gb and the instructions that Tom provided worked fine.  I did not need to use the super.dat that I backed up and saved to my desktop.

I've noticed that Tom, in a recent version I believe, has added a little feature: a copy of config/super.dat is saved to config/super.old.  I don't know for sure, but I'm guessing it was added for situations like this thread.  So a user who proceeded to upgrade a drive without a backup of super.dat, and had a failure during the process, could restore their previous configuration, with the help of a little tech support.  Of course, this needs to be confirmed by Tom, as to when we can trust super.old to be valid for restoration.  We need to know what circumstances trigger its creation, AND what changes do not create a newer version of it.