question on moving to a new motherboard/cpu ide/sata

[tnorman]

So my Unraid 5 server died about a couple months ago. I haven't had time until recently to look at it and I think the motherboard died on it (one of the capacitors looked like it was exploding/bulging), so I'm buying a motherboard/cpu for it. I'll be moving from a motherboard that didn't support Sata to one that does. So here's my question....

 

The previous build had a pci Sata Controller with 4 drivers attached and then 2 IDE drives(1 as cache, one as part of the server) attached to the motherboard.

 

How do I move the old drives to a new build? I don't want to lose the data on there. Does the hardware change matter to unraid or will it figure out what drive is what once it sees the data?

I'm going to have to remove the IDE drive and replace it with a new Sata drive.... transferring the data is easy to do, but what are the issues I will need to address? Do I just move the data and then start up the new system with the Unraid USB with the previous version 5 install on it with the 6 sata drives attached (4 of the old ones, and then 2 new ones to replace the previous drives)?

 

Or should I start over with a clean Unraid USB install instead?

 

I'm not sure which is the best way to approach this. Thanks for the input!

[itimpi]

If you are getting a new motherboard, then it almost certainly will not support the IDE drive.  On that basis you will need to do a new configuration and assign the current drives (make sure you know which is the cache and which is the parity drive).  To play safe you start without the parity drive assigned until you are certain you have gotten the correct data drives assigned.

 

If you have done a new config and add the drives previously used by unRAID then it will recognise that they contain data so when you start up unRAID they will show up as already containing data.  If any show up as 'unformatted' then you have probably assigned the parity drive as a data drive.

 

It might be worth deciding whether this is an appropriate time to go to v6 as well?  If you do not use any plugins then this would probably be painless.  If you go down that route then the easiest thing to do would be to create a clean v6 USB drive.  Make sure that you have got a backup of your .key file of your current if you go this route.

 

As to the best way to get the data off the IDE drive, then I can see a couple of ways:

• Use an IDE/USB adapter (you might be able to borrow one from a friend) and then you can use that to connect the drive to either an unRAID or PC/Mac.  If you go down the PC route then you probably want to get hold of the free Linux reader program.
  
• If you have another PC that supports IDE then you could plug in the IDE drive.  This would also require the Linux Reader app to get at the data.
  

[tnorman]

Thank you for the info. I've got an IDE -USB adapter that I was already planning to use to get the data off the IDE drives. Not sure if I want to go with v6. I like the XFS file system and I don't really use any plugins that are necessary, though I've been thinking of using the Crashplan plugin and moving my backuping up to the Unraid server instead of my main system. But I doubt I'll do it.

 

How reliable is v6? I'll have to look more info up on it since I haven't checked anything about it out yet.

[tnorman]

I couldn't get the IDE to USB drive to be readable with Linux reader. It could see the drive, but it couldn't read the contents. Not sure why. I even tried connecting the drive to the unraid system, but it wouldn't recognize it through the USB to IDE connection. It turned out I didn't have a cache drive so there was just 1 drive to replace.

 

So on the new system, I replaced the old IDE drive with a new SATA drive and let it remake the information. Everything is up and running. thank you for the help.