Back again, this time with a sensible question.....I hope 

 

I've built myself an Atom based unRaid system to replace my 2 drive Icybox NAS. I bought a new Hitachi drive to go in the unRaid server and start the migration process. The idea was to copy everything off the first drive in the NAS to the brand new drive, pull that drive out the NAS, format it in unRaid and then copy everything off the second NAS drive across. Once complete I could then use the second NAS drive as a parity drive in the unRaid server. With me so far? Good

 

Well today I got to the point where everything was backed up and I was ready to make the switch. I popped the second NAS drive into the unraid box (making three drives in total) and got this screen.

 

 

The parity drive is a fraction smaller than the other data drives (although you'd probably guessed that from the title of the thread  ).

 

So the question is, can I use the mv (or cp) command to "clone" the hitachi drive onto to smaller Seagate and retain the shares? Or am I going to have to devise some way of shifting the data around...........again 

Gigabyte motherboard by any chance?  Search the forums for HPA for lots of info.

It is a gigabyte mobo - I'll disable HPA and have another go.

 

Once again the unRaid forums come to the rescue - thanks Chris, appreciate your help 

It is a gigabyte mobo - I'll disable HPA and have another go.

 

Once again the unRaid forums come to the rescue - thanks Chris, appreciate your help 

It is not as simple as that...

 

You really need to perform the following steps:

 

For the short term, you can see if you can disable the BIOS feature that is creating a Host-Protected-Area on your disks.  This is NOT a good solution since some day, when your CMOS battery dies, the feature will re-enable itself, and it WILL change the size of one of your disks, and it will cause you to all kinds of grief.

 

If you cannot disable the feature, you basically either need to get a different motherboard, or a BIOS upgrade.  The newest of Gigabyte BIOS have the feature disabled by default.  This is what you want.  The older of Gigabyte BIOS have no way to disable the feature, those are not acceptable for unRAID use (or ANY raid use for that matter)

 

Then, you need to remove the HPA from your parity drive.  This will them make it appear as its correct full size.

 

Do not be fooled into thinking just disabling the feature in the BIOS is enough...  It must be disabled by default.  Other unRAID users have actually swapped out motherboards because the feature either was not disabled by default, or could not be disabled at all.

 

Joe L.