May 19, 20179 yr Hey, Just finished building a PC I've been building for 1.5 years. I only want Unraid for virtualization, at least for now. I have three disks: 850 evo 960 pro samsung HDD 1. Going in blindly, I added them to an array (no parity or cache) and started it, in hopes of making a VM. 2. I found out that I needed to make shares and later came to the conclusion that I'd need to format every drive in the array in order to successfuly create a share (I don't want to lose my files so I didn't format) 3. Found an option to reset the config and successfully got the disks out of the array (everything is unassigned now) 4. 850 evo with Windows 10 on it will automatically boot to unraid with Unraid USB or show boot error without the usb plugged in. Now I wonder... are all of my files on every drive gone or Windows boot files were overwritten when I added disks to Unraid array as data drives? Windows 10 drive (850 evo) is not important, however I backed up all of my most precious files on 960 pro, which I suspect might also have a problem just like the OS drive. Can't check without an OS (well perhaps I could in Unraid?).. or I could reinstall Windows 10 on 850 evo and cross my fingers that the files on the 960 pro are fine. I did later find a guide on how to add an already existing OS to Unraid though too late for that.. or not? I installed the unassigned devices plugin which supposedly should manage ntfs drives and theoretically allow me to use create a VM running the existing OS on it..right? Another dumb question: How does unraid run a Windows OS on a linux formatted drive? (format which is compulsory without plugins as I understand) Thank you for Your time.
May 19, 20179 yr Seems you are jumping in with both feet! You'll make some mistakes but learn along the way. First I would ask why you are adding those three disks, 2 SSDs and one hard drive. How big are they? What is the intended purpose of each? If the NAS functionality is not a primary requirement, you might consider setting the hard disk as disk1, one of the SSDs as cache, and the other SSD as mounted outside the array, or possibly passed through to a VM. A VM typically consists of a virtual disk which is created in an SSD. To unRaid this is one big file, but inside the VM, that file contains all of the OS files. Each VM would have one (or more) of these virtual drives. You would not typically have a physical disk as the boot disk, but there are a lot of options and I'm not saying that it's impossible to see it up that way. You'd might have to "pass through" a disk to operate in that manner. If you have a non-VM OS install you want to make virtual, you might need to back it up and restore it into the VM. I have done that with my Windows installs over the years before major upgrades. I have a lot of VM existence with VMware workstation and little with unRaid's VM feature, so this is just high level info. You'll have to read more about setting up VMs in the forum. Respond with more details and we can peel away the onion and hopefully get you where you want to go.
May 19, 20179 yr 1 hour ago, theodor2005 said: Now I wonder... are all of my files on every drive gone or Windows boot files were overwritten when I added disks to Unraid array as data drives? Files aren't gone, but the partition table is. You will need to run a recovery program of some flavour to recreate it.
May 19, 20179 yr Author 6 hours ago, bjp999 said: Seems you are jumping in with both feet! You'll make some mistakes but learn along the way. First I would ask why you are adding those three disks, 2 SSDs and one hard drive. How big are they? What is the intended purpose of each? If the NAS functionality is not a primary requirement, you might consider setting the hard disk as disk1, one of the SSDs as cache, and the other SSD as mounted outside the array, or possibly passed through to a VM. A VM typically consists of a virtual disk which is created in an SSD. To unRaid this is one big file, but inside the VM, that file contains all of the OS files. Each VM would have one (or more) of these virtual drives. You would not typically have a physical disk as the boot disk, but there are a lot of options and I'm not saying that it's impossible to see it up that way. You'd might have to "pass through" a disk to operate in that manner. If you have a non-VM OS install you want to make virtual, you might need to back it up and restore it into the VM. I have done that with my Windows installs over the years before major upgrades. I have a lot of VM existence with VMware workstation and little with unRaid's VM feature, so this is just high level info. You'll have to read more about setting up VMs in the forum. Respond with more details and we can peel away the onion and hopefully get you where you want to go. My plan with the three disks: 850 evo 1TB - divided into two for two Windows VM’s 960 pro 2TB NVME - For one of the VM’s: photoediting 16bit TIFF files exceeding 1GB in size per photo in photoshop. Probably pass the whole device through for optimal performance? Samsung HDD 1TB - a dying drive that I thought to use for whatever. Perhaps storing downloaded setup files, which only get used once anyway. Saves on the SSD write endurance. I know it’s not a problem with contemporary SSD’s, but I think it's a good way to use a dying hard drive. --- Last but not least, 4TB WD purple drive for image backup/storage that I left unplugged due to various reasons. I’d give most of it to photo editing VM and leave a bit for myself - safe non-ssd storage (programming/gaming) --- If the performance impact of not passing a HDD/SSD through is significant, I might have to rethink some things. I will also probably have a headache with usb ports and usb controllers. Which usb devices will remain plugged in and don’t need to be hotpluggable.. what do need to.. and so on. NAS functionality is not a requirement at all. In fact, the whole problem arised from my expectation that I could just attach my hard drives, set which VM’s get what and pass the GPU’s through. Mounting outside the array - Does this capability come from the unassigned devices plugin? 6 hours ago, Spies said: testdisk is pretty good for recovering the partition table. I’ll be able to continue with VM configuration and Unraid stuff on monday. I’ll be trying non-stop from that day forward to get everything working. So I’ll be able to update on how things go on monday. Thank you everybody for your valuable input. Edited May 19, 20179 yr by theodor2005
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