So my Motherboard, GA-EX58-EXTREME (Socket 1366 w/ i7-940, 30GB of RAM) died last week while I was out of town.

Sad day, but it was 7 1/2 years old, so I guess that is life.

 

I have ordered a few new parts to get myself back up an running again.

 

I have gone with:

ASRock Rack C226 WS Motherboard

Xeon E3-1246 v3

along with another matching 8GB stick of RAM to bring me to an even 32GB

 

So once I Swap out the Motherboard and get her powered back up and running, do I need to do anything special?

As far as i am aware, I should be able to boot from USB right back into unRAID without any issues.

Parity check is a must, but other than that I should be good right?

 

I have 5 Drives, a cache drive, 3 Data and a Parity.

 

Thanks for any input you guys can provide.

Hoping all the parts will arrive by next weekend and i can get back up an running with minimal issues / get any prep work done prior.

 

Since the configuration is stored on the USB flash you can swap motherboards without taking any special precautions. Just go through the BIOS carefully and make sure the SATA ports are set to AHCI mode and make sure the system will boot from the USB flash. Before I replaced my motherboard the last thing I did was to set my array not to autostart and ran it for the first time on the new motherboard in maintenance mode, but I was just being extra cautious and since your motherboard has failed you might not have that option.

Can I manually edit that setting in (edit files on the flash drive?) or should i boot another computer into unRAID and set that before i move everything over?

Or is that just overly cautious and not required.

 

Thanks for the advice

I didn't boot unRAID the first time I powered up my new motherboard. I chose the MemTest from the boot menu and let it run for 48 hours. I did that without the disks installed so if you did the same you could then boot unRAID, assuming the memory passes the test, and it won't find any disks so it won't be able to start the array. So set auto-start to off, shut down and install the disks, checking all the power and data cables carefully. It possibly being overcautious to start up for the first time in maintenance mode but I didn't want the possibility of anything writing to the array until I'd run a parity check, which I ran with the "Write corrections to parity disk" box unchecked. It all went well and reported zero errors.

You might format an extra USB drive with a fresh install of unRAID and play with that until you are sure you are booting cleanly.  Do *not* assign drives or start the array with the fresh install - you'd just be validating that you have everything hooked up properly.

Thanks guys for the tips.

I am all back up an running with no data lose