February 27, 20197 yr I recently sold my computer along with my GF's with the hope of purchasing one new computer to do the job of both old computers. I just received the parts for the new computer last night and finished putting it together. I removed our hard drives from our old computers before selling them and would like to know if it is possible to keep the data on the two drives when using Limetech?
February 27, 20197 yr Community Expert Unraid must format any disk it will use in the parity array or cache pool. You can work with other disks using the Unassigned Devices plugin.
February 27, 20197 yr Author I figured that I would need to reformat if I planed on having parity. Do I have to have parity? And if I were to go the Unassigned route would I not be able to boot from these drives? I am very new to this whole thing.
February 27, 20197 yr Community Expert There is no way to get Unraid to use a disk as array disk, parity disk or cache disk without losing its contents (unless Unraid formatted the disk in the first place). if you want to keep the contents then you would first need to set up the array on new disks. Then you can use the Unassigned Devices plugin to mount your existing disks so that data can be copied off them to the array.
February 27, 20197 yr Author I think I am following what you're saying. So if I purchase a new HDD for my parity disk and and two SSD's for my cache I can boot off my old hard drives as unassigned devices after they have been mounted to the new HDD parity disk. Is this correct?
February 27, 20197 yr Community Expert 8 minutes ago, Bustom5 said: I can boot off my old hard drives You can't boot from then, you can mount them and access their data, assuming they are formatted with a supported filesystem, like ntfs.
February 27, 20197 yr Author Ouch! Ok, thank you everyone for all of the help. I will attempt to set this thing up tonight!
February 27, 20197 yr Community Expert 8 minutes ago, Bustom5 said: I think I am following what you're saying. So if I purchase a new HDD for my parity disk and and two SSD's for my cache I can boot off my old hard drives as unassigned devices after they have been mounted to the new HDD parity disk. Is this correct? Unraid is the Operating System. It boots from a flash drive. A parity disk by itself is pointless, you must have at least one data disk in the array, whether you have parity or not. You can read and write your other disks as Unassigned Devices.
February 27, 20197 yr Author Maybe I should start with what I have. One 8GB USB drive with unraid OS New 4TB HDD Two 256GB SSDS with windows 10 pro (1 from my old PC and the other from my GF's) One 1TB HDD from my old computer with all of my files on it and no operating system One 2TB HDD from my girlfriends computer with all of her files and no operating system *If I need to purchase another SSD for a cache I will* What method would allow me to format the least of my current hard drives?
February 27, 20197 yr Community Expert 4 minutes ago, Bustom5 said: What method would allow me to format the least of my current hard drives? This is probably the wrong question. Now that you have told us (some) of what you have to work with, it would probably be a good idea to tell us what you want to end up with. What do you want Unraid to do for you? From the OP I am guessing you want 2 Windows virtual machines, but there are a lot of details left out of that simple statement.
February 27, 20197 yr Community Expert You can use the new 4TB as the only array drive, and it will be the only one you need to format for now, this will let you mount, access and copy the data from the other devices with UD, though not sure what you intend to do after, if you want to use the other devices as array and/or cache devices they will need to be formatted first.
February 27, 20197 yr Author 3 minutes ago, trurl said: What do you want Unraid to do for you? My goal is to turn my current desktop into basically two desktops. I would like to hit the power button and two copies of Win 10 load up on two separate computer screens. Each one being controlled by its own mouse and keyboard. I would very much like to accomplish this without losing any of the data stored on my hard drives. If this is not possible that is ok too. Probably where I should have started to begin with I suppose. Sorry about that.
February 27, 20197 yr Author My complete list of items I am working with: MOBO- X399 Aorus Gaming 7 RAM- 32GB DDR4 3200 CPU- X1950 GPUs- 1 GTX 1070, 1 GTX 980, 1 GeForce 240 Storage- One 8GB USB drive with unraid OS New 4TB HDD Two 256GB SSDS with windows 10 pro (1 from my old PC and the other from my GF's) One 1TB HDD from my old computer with all of my files on it and no operating system One 2TB HDD from my girlfriends computer with all of her files and no operating system 4 monitors, 2 keyboard, 2 mice. Aside from the two VMs my GF and I will be using daily, I would eventually like to create a 3rd VM attached to my downstiars TV via KVM extender through CAT6. I am not sure if this is the sort of info you are looking for or not. If I am not telling you something need to know it's only because I either don't know or I'm trying not to bog you down with info.
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