I'm using the latest unRAID via USB drive with Docker containers for a headless media server, no OS.

 

I'd like to add a full blown Server OS to essentially "dual-boot" along side of it. What's the best practice doing this?

 

My concerns are my storage, I have One 4TB parity drive, One 500Gb "media" drive and One 120Gb cache drive - all are open and unpartitioned, being used by unRAID. I'm assuming I have to do some partitioning?

 

Anyone with experience doing this or can shed some light, please let me know.

 

Thanks.

I think any drives used in the array or the cache'd drive won't place nice with partitioning. Why don't you run your server OS as a VM?

I asked a somewhat similar question about dual booting Windows 10 and an unRAID test server.  I was willing to have the disks be as logically separate as possible, i.e. a Win10 SSD and several array drives for unRAID with no specific intent to share them across OS's.

 

I didn't get many responses, and what I did get suggested it was a bad idea... It's pretty hard to guarantee that "the current OS" won't do something inappropriate to disks/partitions you want to be managed by "the other OS".  I know that's pretty vague, but it's as far as I got with it.  VM is potentially a better option if your hardware supports it.

If you understand how unRAID uses parity it is obvious that you cannot let any other OS (unRAID is itself an OS) have direct access to any drives in the parity array.

 

VM is the answer you are looking for and unRAID has KVM hypervisor builtin so if your hardware supports it why would you consider any other solution?

 

What is your hardware?

I have Win7 on a dedicated, bootable drive in my dual-boot test server that works fine alongside an unRAID array. As others have noted, you have to make sure Windows doesn't access any of the unRAID array drives when it's running.  The other challenge for you specifically (with a headless system) is that you have to be able to access the motherboard BIOS to tell it which OS to boot into (i.e., boot unRAID from flash drive, boot Windows from Win7 drive).

 

As others have also noted, using a VM for your other "full blown Server OS" may be a better solution, as it allows unRAID and your Server VM to run side-by-side, and eliminates the need to access the BIOS.  That's what I do on my production server, where I have Win10 running in a VM.

Thank you all for the replies. You're right, VM IS the obvious choice - in my defense I recently became a father so sleep has been non-existent... so I appreciate you guys helping me out.

 

I use a spare monitor when I need to config BIOS or RAID so that's no problem. As far as equipment goes I'm running a HP Proliant i3 Minitower (3.5Ghz, HT) so VM is perfect.

 

I won't be at my server until tonight, where can I find the builtin KVM?

 

My goal is to run a private game server, either Linux or Windows based and utilize a secondary NIC port on the box.

 

Any suggestions on how to make sure this game server storage doesn't effect unRAID?

 

Thanks again, all.

Go read in the KVM subforum. Also, you may not be able to get video out for your VM depending on your CPU and mobo.