i just pulled my mother board and sent it back to newegg for a refund (bad NIC).  what i am wondering is if i have to hook the drives up to the same ports they were originally hooked up to on the motherboard (IDE and SATA ports).

 

i dont want to lose the data that is on my drives so i just want to be 100% sure.

I found the following two threads that relate to your question:

 

From Joe L. at http://lime-technology.com/forum/index.php?topic=893.msg6202#msg6202:

 

You can simulate a hardware change that results in the physical disks ending up on different Linux devices.  (i.e., you swap out the motherboard, or a disk controller, and now what used to be /dev/hdb is showing up as /dev/hdk.)  Simply assign the same physical disk, regardless of what it is called, to the same logical slot in the array and you are up and running.

 

AND

 

http://lime-technology.com/forum/index.php?topic=858.0

 

From the above posts it seems like unRAID doesn't care what linux device the drives are on.  As long as you "re" assign them in the correct order.  I'll let someone else correct me if I drew the wrong conclusion.

 

-kenshin

Yep, just print the Devices page or screen-capture it.  You can change any or all of the hardware, re-assign the drive serial numbers to their Disk number, and you should be good to go.

 

You could probably grab the hard drives and the flash drive, travel across the country, find a computer with the right drive connectors, hook up the drives and flash, adjust the BIOS to boot from your flash, re-assign your drives to the correct Disk and Serial #, and your unRAID system should come up intact.

 

Wonder if there is an application here for a portable storage server.  Stick some drives in an external backplane unit, eSata interface with Port Multiplier support, and you could carry it and your flash to any computer with a similarly equipped eSATA port, and boot it as your unRAID server.  Once Tom adds the security features, there might be a use for this in high-security situations.  It's doable now with TrueCrypt volumes.

 

 

i dont want to lose the data that is on my drives

 

The unRAID system uses the ReiserFS file system for the data drives.  There are Windows tools to read those drives, so no data should be lost, another advantage of the unRAID un-striped storage system.

 

that's one thing i didn't do is take a screen cap of the drives or print it from the web interface.  so when i bring the system back up i guess i will just have to make my best guess and once the array comes back up, i can take a look at what drive is what, and then reassign the drives to the correct drive number is necessary.

 

so what windows tools are able to read reiserFS?  hopefully i wont need it but i am curious.

that's one thing i didn't do is take a screen cap of the drives or print it from the web interface.  so when i bring the system back up i guess i will just have to make my best guess and once the array comes back up, i can take a look at what drive is what, and then reassign the drives to the correct drive number is necessary..

Actually, the only drive that is critical to get assigned correctly is the parity drive.  UnRaid can deal with swapping around of the data drives just fine.  (Of course, if you put your old disk1 in slot disk8 its contents will now be found at /mnt/disk8 instead of /mnt/disk1.

 

Hopefully, you will remember which physical drive was the parity drive.

worst case, when setting up the drives, it displays the serial number right?  so i coudl just pull the parity drive and look at th serial number and be able to determie the correct rive right?

 

for that matter i have all of my drive bays labeled (parity, 1, 2, 3, 4..._)  i just don't have themall labeled with the serial number.

so what windows tools are able to read reiserFS?

 

http://lime-technology.com/forum/index.php?topic=377.0

http://lime-technology.com/forum/index.php?topic=245.0

 

The above threads mention rfstool and YaReg, and include a link to them.  I personally like TotalCommander, and it has a plugin that reads ext2/3 and ReiserFS, although I have yet to try it, sorry.

 

cool - thank for posting!