I am building an Unraid server that will have 20 bays. It will have a M4A89GTD motherboard.

 

Would it be possible to use then Unraid server as a normal computer running Windows 7 or is this unwise?

Try and look at some of the VMWare / VirtualBox threads.

 

It is possible, but not easy. I have thought about it, but so far not ventured into it...

I am building an Unraid server that will have 20 bays. It will have a M4A89GTD motherboard.

 

Would it be possible to use then Unraid server as a normal computer running Windows 7 or is this unwise?

 

Some folks are using their unRAID server to also host virtual machines.  So far it requires a custom distro of linux that you have to build yourself and then install VMware Server or some other similar hosting software.  It's not for the novice.  There are procedures in the forum that you can search for if interested.

 

If you are asking if you can install Win7 and use it for a typical desktop computer then probably not really a useful thing for most people.  But that depends on how you want to use it.  I've built virtual machines with Windows that I use for development machines and remote into them.  The GUI is constrained by network speed but for some purposes that's ok.  You still need to remote into the VM from somewhere so it doesn't usually get rid of your desktop.  It's mainly for setting up environments to work in.

I am a complete novice but I have an idea: When you want to boot into windows, couldn't you remove the usb flash drive with unraid on it and have a single separate hdd (with Windows 7 on it) on one motherboard sata port?

You could, but then you have no access to the server while Windows is booted. I suppose you could read but you can't write to the disks when unRAID isn't working or you break the parity protection. It just does not seems like a very practical solution if you require a desktop machine.

 

Peter

 

You can run unRAID from a full slackware distro. But then, you'll have a linux PC, not a Windows one.