UPgrading to a new Machine

[rott]

I have all my parts for a new build nothing fancy Fractal 4 case and a 990FXA mother board with 16g DDR31333 ram. moving from my old machine in to this one is there any thing I need to do? or is it as simple as just move all the drives in to the new box in the same order? and update the license key on the key drive. Couldn't find information on it or was just looking in the wrong place's

 

is there any reason to format the key drive and reinstall unraid  

Edited September 3, 2017 by rott

[FreeMan]

I went through a complete hardware upgrade in the 5.x days. I built the new machine, transferred the drives, plugged in my USB stick and fired it up. Everything was hunky dory.

 

I don't believe anything has changed since.

[SSD]

unRaid literally reinstalls on every boot, so you might say every boot is to a new motherboard, so assuming everything was migrated correctly (mainly your drives and controllers), it should just work. Suggest running a 24 hour memtest on the new rig before booting unRaid. Also suggest turning off automatic array start before booting the first time to give a chance to review the syslog for issues before starting the array. Also disable auto start of all Dockers and VMs.

 

The main thing I'd be concerned about is the drive cabling. Double and triple check all is secure.

 

Also, go through the BIOS settings and make sure everything is set properly. AHCI should be selected.  SMART enabled. Vt-x (if you are doing VMs) and VT-d (if you are doing pass through) should be turned on. USB settings sometimes require some tweaking to boot off the usb. Turn off any overclocking of CPU or RAM.

 

If you are doing any pass through, those configurations will need to be redone on the new motherboard. More on this below.

 

Make a backup of your unRaid flash.

 

When you do start unRaid with the new motherboard, I suggest safe mode. Do a non-correcting parity check. Let it run for a while (30 mins) to make sure all is well. Monitor the syslog for drive issues, like link resets and speed downgrades. If you see any, stop the check and shutdown and re-examine the cabling to the drives in question. Then repeat until you have a non-eventful parity check for at least 30 minutes. If a drive drops, you'll want to shutdown and restore the backup of the config folder (most importantly the super.dat file) before rebooting. When all is good in safe mode, reboot in regular mode and start your Dockers one at a time and make sure they are working. Then same for VMs. Relook at your CPU pinning and memory allocations in light of the new configuration. Like I said, if you're doing passthrough you'll have to go through the whole process of setting that up again.

 

I suggest a full parity check the first night.

 

Usually these motherboard swaps are surprisingly simple, but good to be prepared for issues.

 

Good luck! 

 

[rott]

thank you.

I will get to work on changing every thing over