Trying unRAID

[PiersonJarvis]

Hello,

 

I've been looking into using unRAID in my home as a media server and a multi gaming pc (more than one os in a single tower) I want to use some of my existing hardware including several drives with data on them already, this data is larger than the amount I have on empty drives. Is there a way to add these existing drives to the array without erasing the data that is on them and without having to move it to a new drive already in the array? Also as a side note is there a way to port over my existing computer's OS drive to a virtual drive? I don't care much for the parody availability, I don't need to back up any of this data it's all just games from steam I can just download again, I'd just rather not have to start my 1.5 TB library from scratch when testing out unRAID.

[tdallen]

15 minutes ago, PiersonJarvis said:

Is there a way to add these existing drives to the array without erasing the data that is on them and without having to move it to a new drive already in the array?

Hello and welcome.  Unfortunately the short answer to your question is no.  A drive previously formatted in an UnRAID server can be added to the array without reformatting, but any other drive will have to be formatted when it is added to the array. 

[SSD]

24 minutes ago, PiersonJarvis said:

Hello,

 

I've been looking into using unRAID in my home as a media server and a multi gaming pc (more than one os in a single tower) I want to use some of my existing hardware including several drives with data on them already, this data is larger than the amount I have on empty drives. Is there a way to add these existing drives to the array without erasing the data that is on them and without having to move it to a new drive already in the array?

 

You might be able to move your drives into the server and not have to reformat them, but in order to have in the protected array, you'd have to copy the data over to array drives, partitioned and formatted by unRaid. You would not need the sum of available space for all your data. Just enough to handle your largest disk. Once safely copied over, you could add that disk to the array and then copy your second disk to that disk. Etc, etc.

Quote

Also as a side note is there a way to port over my existing computer's OS drive to a virtual drive? I don't care much for the parody availability, I don't need to back up any of this data it's all just games from steam I can just download again, I'd just rather not have to start my 1.5 TB library from scratch when testing out unRAID.

 

You should be able to port over your physical os disk.

[JonathanM]

If you are planning to run your current OS as a VM under unraid, you need to give more details about your hardware. Virtualization has specific things that are needed to pass through hardware and use the machine as your desktop instead of just a headless server.

[PiersonJarvis]

On 7/7/2017 at 5:02 PM, bjp999 said:

 

You might be able to move your drives into the server and not have to reformat them

As of right now I don't care about them being protected, so how would i go about adding them without reformatting them?

[SSD]

On 7/7/2017 at 8:06 PM, jonathanm said:

If you are planning to run your current OS as a VM under unraid, you need to give more details about your hardware. Virtualization has specific things that are needed to pass through hardware and use the machine as your desktop instead of just a headless server.

 

Thanks for clarifying @jonathanm! I read this quickly - and sure the OS disk can be ported over. But the OS would not survive!

 

There are ways to visualize a physical server. And maybe even a way to boot a virtual server from an existing physical drive. But I expect it would take a lot of prep work to uninstall all of the hardware specific drivers. And no guarantees.