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Prepare my hard drives before my systems is built?


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Is there anything that I can do to my hard drives thru Windows Vista, to prepare them for my new UnRaid build?  Or do I need to wait until I have my build done, and run the Preclear on each of them?  All the hard drives that I have, have been used before, and include to start, 1) 2tb and 5) 1tb.

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Do not think you can do it thru Vista, but if you do not need your Windows Vista machine for a bit to run the preclear, then you should be able to boot up the Windows Vista machine with the unRAID USB and run the preclear scripts.

Just do not assign any hard disks if you boot up your vista PC with an unRAID flash drive. 

 

And MORE IMPORTANT ... DO NOT CLEAR THE HARD DISK HOLDING THE VISTA OPERATING SYSTEM. The protections built into the preclear_disk.sh script will happily allow you to clear any disk not part of the assigned array.  Since booting up a Vista PC with an unRAID image would not have any disk assigned you could easily clear the built-in disk by mistake if you selected it and then said "Yes" I really want to clear it.  (It would then do as you asked... and get rid of all those pesky Vista bits)

 

Joe L.

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Okay, I stole (borrowed) my kids computer.  And I have it up to the Tower Login.  Can I do everything from here with monitor and keyboard, or do I have to hook it up to a network to access the menu thru http://tower?  I don't have access to another computer to network with right now.  If I can, what do I type after I login with root?

If you already have the preclear_disk.sh script downloaded and un-zipped on the drive you can do it all from logging in on the system console.

 

To determine the devices in the PC type

ls -l /dev/disk/by-id

 

The "device" name will be at the end of the line with its model/serial number.

 

Then type

cd /boot

preclear_disk.sh /dev/XYX

where XYX is the correct three letter designation for your new disk you wish to pre-clear.  It will probably be sda, sdb or sdc.

(one device will be the flash drive, one the disk drive in the PC, the third the new drive to be cleared)

 

It will then read the partitioning on the disk and ask you to confirm it is the correct disk before starting the clearing process.

 

(/boot is the top level folder on the flash drive when you have it inserted on your PC in windows mode, so, if you un-zipped the preclear_disk.sh program there, it should run when you invoke it after changing directory to it.

 

Be aware that clearing a 2TB disk will take a day or more.  Most people report 30 to 35 hours.... Hopefully your kid will not want to play games while it runs, because they will not be able to use their PC until you are done.

 

Since you said you have no network connection you'll need to download and un-zip the preclear_disk.sh script to the top level folder on the flash drive before you boot it  up on your kid's PC.  Do that step while it is plugged into your main PC.

 

Joe L.

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Okay, I stole (borrowed) my kids computer.  And I have it up to the Tower Login.  Can I do everything from here with monitor and keyboard, or do I have to hook it up to a network to access the menu thru http://tower?  I don't have access to another computer to network with right now.  If I can, what do I type after I login with root?

If you already have the preclear_disk.sh script downloaded and un-zipped on the drive you can do it all from logging in on the system console.

 

To determine the devices in the PC type

ls -l /dev/disk/by-id

 

The "device" name will be at the end of the line with its model/serial number.

 

Then type

cd /boot

preclear_disk.sh /dev/XYX

where XYX is the correct three letter designation for your new disk you wish to pre-clear.  It will probably be sda, sdb or sdc.

(one device will be the flash drive, one the disk drive in the PC, the third the new drive to be cleared)

 

It will then read the partitioning on the disk and ask you to confirm it is the correct disk before starting the clearing process.

 

(/boot is the top level folder on the flash drive when you have it inserted on your PC in windows mode, so, if you un-zipped the preclear_disk.sh program there, it should run when you invoke it after changing directory to it.

 

Be aware that clearing a 2TB disk will take a day or more.  Most people report 30 to 35 hours.... Hopefully your kid will not want to play games while it runs, because they will not be able to use their PC until you are done.

 

Since you said you have no network connection you'll need to download and un-zip the preclear_disk.sh script to the top level folder on the flash drive before you boot it  up on your kid's PC.  Do that step while it is plugged into your main PC.

 

Joe L.

 

Thanks that does work.  This computer is a old dell that was replaced by Notebook computers, so they won't miss it.

 

Is it possible to access the main menu for UnRaid or is it only command line work that can be done? I do have access to a Notebook computer, if it was possible to directly connect with an ethernet cable to the UnRaid computer without a Switch between them?

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Is it possible to access the main menu for UnRaid or is it only command line work that can be done? I do have access to a Notebook computer, if it was possible to directly connect with an ethernet cable to the UnRaid computer without a Switch between them?

 

I believe the answer is it depends

 

I read where you might/should be able to do it but it depends upon the NICs and whether they will handle the crossover or not.

Otherwise you would need a crossover ethernet cable instead of your normal ethernet cable.

 

My setup required a crossover cable which I didn't have, so I just did the stuff I could via command line.

 

Remember, if you have multiple drives to preclear, you can run them same time by running multiple console windows  (ctrl-f1, ctrl-f2, ... ctrl-f6). 1 disk preclear per console window

 

 

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