Migrating to new hardware?

[knighttae]

Hi,

 

I'm looking to completely upgrade my Unraid server's hw. Totally replace cpu/motherboard/etc but keep all the remaining drives. Are there any guides to doing this? Any gotcha's or potential issues I need to be aware of (hard drives not recognized?). Will my Unraid license work on new hardware?

Edited November 15, 2020 by knighttae

[trurl]

Many including me have done this. The license goes with the flash drive to the new hardware, Unraid doesn't care as long as the flash GUID is the same.

 

If your current system is using RAID controller (shouldn't be) or your new system is using RAID controller (shouldn't be) then there is definitely a possibility of drives not getting recognized.

 

If you are passing hardware to any VMs then of course you may need to work through that on new hardware.

 

Other than that it should all just boot up and work as before.

 

8 minutes ago, knighttae said:

keep all the remaining drives

Not sure how to interpret this. Are there some drives that are not among the "remaining drives"?

[knighttae]

18 minutes ago, trurl said:

Many including me have done this. The license goes with the flash drive to the new hardware, Unraid doesn't care as long as the flash GUID is the same.

 

If your current system is using RAID controller (shouldn't be) or your new system is using RAID controller (shouldn't be) then there is definitely a possibility of drives not getting recognized.

 

If you are passing hardware to any VMs then of course you may need to work through that on new hardware.

 

Other than that it should all just boot up and work as before.

 

Not sure how to interpret this. Are there some drives that are not among the "remaining drives"?

 

Okay, cool. Sounds like it should be pretty painless. To clarify on the drives. I also use unassigned devices plugin and have several drives setup through that. Will those be recognized to? Or might require extra work?

[trurl]

8 minutes ago, knighttae said:

I also use unassigned devices plugin and have several drives setup through that. Will those be recognized to? Or might require extra work?

As long as they have the same identifier, which is the disk serial number unless you have RAID controller or some USB enclosure for those.

[Watter]

I hope the OP wont' mind if I latch on here. 

 

Yesterday was fun. I won't go into details on how, but water spewed (yes, literally spewed... with force) onto my Unraid server. Surprise, surprise it no longer boots. I suspect - hope, I guess - that the mechanical drives will come through this OK. I think I understand the procedure as described above, but I'm going to go through the steps and see if anything jumps out. 

 

1. Empty out and clean my existing server case.

2. Rebuild the server with all new components except the hard drives. 

3. Install cache drive, array drives, and Unraid USB stick

4. Turn the machine on and go?

 

I understand the caveats regarding docker image resource use and that's fine. I don't even mind setting those up again from scratch. It's just Plex for the most part. That all seems way too easy. Will Unraid use the drive's GUID's to know what they are and where they go in the array? I guess if that's the case, then maybe it this really can work. 

 

If the above is correct, then I can of course, do exactly that. But let's add a few wrinkles. What if I wanted to use the opportunity to switch from a few random crappy SATA cards to a single LSI 9201-16i? Does that change anything?

 

 

 

[trurl]

The main things you need to be concerned with is making sure the disks are identified correctly. If you are using SATA or SAS connections without any hardware RAID then they will be identified by serial number.

 

If you have any VMs that require direct access to hardware then obviously those might need tweaking if you change hardware.

 

The main thing with wet electronics is removing power immediately and then drying completely. Often times many things will survive.

[Watter]

Thank you for the reply. My new hardware arrived today so I guess I'll be giving it a go. 

[tvd1]

Any issues moving UnRaid from a intel i5 to xeon mobo? 

[trurl]

I did just this recently. CPU shouldn't matter but other specifics about the mobos may be things you need to consider. See other posts in this thread. 

[Harlequin42]

My Problem:

I upgraded my hardware and no i am not able to boot completly.

I cannot access the GUI nor from a network client neither from the connected display and get the message "unable to connect".
The server is reachable via ping but i am not able to start it because the array is encrypted and i am not able to insert the passphrase.

 

So what happend:
I read many threads and was pretty optimistic that everthing will be fine after switching the hardware, but i was disabused...

 

New hardware:

- Case Inter-Tech 4416 with SAS Backplane

- AsRock X399 Fatal1ty

- Threadripper 1920x

- 2x nvme ssd

 

Reused hardware:

- Ram

- HDDs

- SSDs

- HBA Controller

- GPUs

 

Old hardware:

- Ryzen 1600x

- ASUS ROG Strix B450-F Gaming

 

To test the new system before moving all my drives i used a trial unraid on a new usb drive.

This worked fine so i prepaired everything and switched hardware.

 

Booting worked so far but i ran into the issue that i was not able to access the GUI.
I tried to copy a backup over the unraid usb drive but this didn't help.
So i tried the other usb drive with the trial unraid and with this i was able to access the GUI, obviously i was not able to start the array because my config and the license was missing.

 

So i tried to copy my config to the trial unraid but then i was also not able to access the GUI.

I tried to copy so many different files or changed the config but nothing worked.

 

Then i copied everything on a new stick and i was able to boot into GUI and was able to access the GUI from a network client.
So i decided to mark my original unraid usb drive as dead and tried to swap the license to the new one.

As soon as i did this and rebooted i was not able to access the GUI anymore.
So i was really confused.
I was wondering if my original unraid drive was really dead or not, so i deleted the "plus.key" file and hey... i was able to boot into GUI and was able to access it via web. ... WHAT????
This took me nearly the whole day to figure this out...

 

So i am only able to access the GUI when there is no license but then i am not able to start the array...

 

I contacted the support but they say it will take up to 3 workdays to get an answer.
But i am not able to access my data at the moment.

So any suggestions?

Edited June 16, 2021 by Harlequin42

[trurl]

On 6/16/2021 at 4:35 AM, Harlequin42 said:

any suggestions?

Post diagnostics

[Harlequin42]

The support contacted me yesterday evening.

They were confused because there appears to be 2 Plus keys now associated with my USB Drive.

They send me a new license key file but got the same problem.
Then i got a second new license key file but still the same problem.

 

Attached the diagnostic files.

sn-home01-diagnostics-20210616-2227.zip

[trurl]

Boot in SAFE mode

[Harlequin42]

1. thanks, didn't expect this to be different than a not started array.

- safe mode GUI (no plugins)

Booting ends up in a blinking courser in the upper left corner

 

- safe mode (no GUI, no plugins)

works

2. What is the difference between safe mode and normal mode without started array?

But what do i have to check now? What is wrong?

What is with these boot settings?

"unRAID OS"

append rcu_nocbs=0-11 pcie_acs_override=downstream vfio-pci disable_idle_d3=1 initrd=/bzroot

compared with "unRAID OS Safe Mode (no plugins, no GUI)"

append initrd=/bzroot unraidsafemode

 

Edited June 17, 2021 by Harlequin42

[Harlequin42]

Update:
I changed the settings for "unRAID OS" to

append rcu_nocbs=0-23 pcie_acs_override=downstream vfio-pci disable_idle_d3=1 initrd=/bzroot

 

Because it is a Threadripper 1920x and has 24 Threads.

And now it booted in GUI Mode.

I don't know why this was affected by a missing key file, but it works now #fingerscrossed