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New DIY Build - Project NORTHSTAR
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Author:  cavediver [ Tue Jan 05, 2010 11:24 am ]
Post subject:  Re: New DIY Build - In the Planning Stage

You can also add the pool drives from FrankenWHS to NEWMachine as non pool drives and copy the data directly instead of over the network. The copy process will be a lot faster. This will also solve your WHS license issue.

Author:  mgannon [ Tue Jan 05, 2010 11:32 am ]
Post subject:  Re: New DIY Build - In the Planning Stage

cavediver wrote:
You can also add the pool drives from FrankenWHS to NEWMachine as non pool drives and copy the data directly instead of over the network. The copy process will be a lot faster. This will also solve your WHS license issue.

How would that work? Don't I need WHS functionality to sort out what actually needs to be moved from the FrankenWHS pool drives (since some of what's on those will, by definition, be duplicates).

Author:  cavediver [ Tue Jan 05, 2010 11:37 am ]
Post subject:  Re: New DIY Build - In the Planning Stage

No. The pool drives are all ntfs formatted and the data is readable on any windows pc. I did this with several drives when migrating data to Andromeda. The internal data transfer speeds are incredible compared to network data transfer speeds.

Author:  mgannon [ Tue Jan 05, 2010 11:40 am ]
Post subject:  Re: New DIY Build - In the Planning Stage

Sounds a little beyond my skill level. My point above was that I'd be looking at three individual pool drives, with loads and loads of individual files, directories, etc., which I assume would not resemble the current pooled "one drive with a handful of shares" setup that I see in WHS.

Author:  cavediver [ Tue Jan 05, 2010 1:37 pm ]
Post subject:  Re: New DIY Build - In the Planning Stage

The files are actually on the drives divided up in the share folders, so you can just copy and paste all of the files from the share folder on the drive to the share in the new pool. It's really quite simple. For practice, you can simply take one of your current storage pool drives and attach it to your pc and take a look at the files that are there. It won't affect the data on the storage pool drive and you can put it back in your FrankenWHS without any problems.

Author:  mgannon [ Tue Jan 05, 2010 2:01 pm ]
Post subject:  Re: New DIY Build - In the Planning Stage

Really? Almost sounds too good to be true! What is still not makeing sense to me, though, is the question of which shares will be on which of the 3 pool drives? Does each share show up only on a single drive? And then what about the duplicated version?

I'm sure this will all make much more sense to me if I just head home and plug one of my pool drives into the e-sata port on my primary desktop PC so I can see what the file structure looks like.

Did you, by chance, save any screen grabs from back when you were doing this procedure on Andromeda?

Author:  cavediver [ Tue Jan 05, 2010 2:22 pm ]
Post subject:  Re: New DIY Build - In the Planning Stage

mgannon wrote:
Really? Almost sounds too good to be true! What is still not makeing sense to me, though, is the question of which shares will be on which of the 3 pool drives? Does each share show up only on a single drive? And then what about the duplicated version?

I'm sure this will all make much more sense to me if I just head home and plug one of my pool drives into the e-sata port on my primary desktop PC so I can see what the file structure looks like.

Did you, by chance, save any screen grabs from back when you were doing this procedure on Andromeda?


You're right. It will all make perfect sense when you get home and can look at the drives. I don't have any screenshots like this. The shares are spread across all of the drives. For example, your video share will probably exist on each of the 3 drives, but the files within the shares on each drive are different. If you're worried about duplicates, just turn off all duplication before you start the data migration. Then you'll only have the original files on the drives.

Author:  mgannon [ Tue Jan 05, 2010 2:26 pm ]
Post subject:  Re: New DIY Build - In the Planning Stage

Cool. So one more question - how did you actually do the copying process once you installed your former pool drives in you new machine? Were you logged directly into the new machine (i.e., not on WHS console from a remote PC) using drag & drop in Windows Explorer, or is there a better tool/technique?

What a resource this place is. Unbelievable! :D

Author:  cavediver [ Tue Jan 05, 2010 2:50 pm ]
Post subject:  Re: New DIY Build - In the Planning Stage

mgannon wrote:
Cool. So one more question - how did you actually do the copying process once you installed your former pool drives in you new machine? Were you logged directly into the new machine (i.e., not on WHS console from a remote PC) using drag & drop in Windows Explorer, or is there a better tool/technique?

What a resource this place is. Unbelievable! :D


There are three ways.
1) RDP into the server. Open two windows; the Shared Folders shortcut and My Computer (windows explorer). Copy and past from the lettered drive to the desired share.

2) You can do the same as 1) by working directly on the server via attached keyboard, mouse and monitor, if you have these.

3) From the Advanced Admin addin in the console.

Easiest is 1) or 2). I prefer 2). With 2) you can just start a copy and paste session and go away, checking on it every once in awhile.

Author:  mgannon [ Tue Jan 05, 2010 2:54 pm ]
Post subject:  Re: New DIY Build - In the Planning Stage

Thanks again for all of the help. :cheers: Think positive migration thoughts tonight.

Author:  JohnBick [ Tue Jan 05, 2010 4:22 pm ]
Post subject:  Re: New DIY Build - In the Planning Stage

You could also take advantage of an "evaluation period" on the WHS license, using it on the NEW server and then transferring the old license. I believe this is still allowed...

Author:  cavediver [ Tue Jan 05, 2010 5:43 pm ]
Post subject:  Re: New DIY Build - In the Planning Stage

mgannon,

You should check out Yakuza's news article: Manually migrating to a new Home Server. There is a lot of good info which I believe, even though your moving between DIY machines, can be helpful to you.

Author:  mgannon [ Tue Jan 05, 2010 10:20 pm ]
Post subject:  Re: New DIY Build - In the Planning Stage

Yep, I read Yakuza's article this morning. Interesting how everyone seems to have a slightly different take on the whole migration process. Then again, everyone's got somewhat different hardware, so I suppose that makes sense at some level. That said, this process really is something that Microsoft should address.

By the way, looks like I might have been a bit optimistic hoping for positive migration thoughts tonight. I'm just now finally getting the new box up and running on just its system drive. You could say it gave me a bit of a rough ride. :twisted: Lots of fiddling with the AHCI/RAID BIOS setup and drivers. Finally got 'er licked, though, after a bunch of trial and error and a whole mess of blue screens and restarts. ](*,) Just now finishing up the updates to PP3, and then I'll see about throwing in a new pool drive or two. File moves might have to wait until tomorrow.

Author:  cavediver [ Tue Jan 05, 2010 10:33 pm ]
Post subject:  Re: New DIY Build - In the Planning Stage

You've got the hard part done. The rest should be easy.

Author:  mgannon [ Wed Jan 06, 2010 8:02 am ]
Post subject:  Re: New DIY Build - In the Planning Stage

cavediver wrote:
1) RDP into the server. Open two windows; the Shared Folders shortcut and My Computer (windows explorer). Copy and past from the lettered drive to the desired share.

So, last night after the new server was up and running on its clean 1TB system disk, I added in one of the new, clean 1.5TB pool disks (remember, the other new 1.5TB disk for the new machine got swapped into FrankenWHS the day before to give FrankenWHS enough room to duplicate all folders). That went off without a hitch, so I plugged in my first (of 3) pool disk from FrankenWHS (the 1.5TB I just mentioned), the new machine recognized it just fine, and I had no problem at all navigating the folder structure. It was filled almost exclusively with files from my Videos share.

Next I RDP'd into the new machine from one of my desktop PCs, followed Cavediver's instructions above, and opened a Windows Explorer session and the Shared Folders shortcut. Just for a test, I started by copying over a sub-directory of my Videos share containing about 60GB of TV recordings. That took about 20 minutes to complete, and everything looked fine. So then I thought, what the heck, and grabbed the remaining two sub-directories (DVD rips, Bluray rips, and home movie files), dragged them over to the new Videos share, and went to bed at about midnight. As of 6:30 this morning, the progress bar was about 7/8 of the way complete, and still moving files.

So, off to work I went. I was hoping the first disk would have completed before I had to go to work so I could start another, but such is life.

Anyway, looks like the process is working very well, if not a little poky. The remaining two pool drives from FrankenWHS (1TB and 750GB) should transfer much more quickly, as I suspect that, aside from being smaller drives, they probably contain far fewer "original" files, since this first drive appeared to contain almost my entire FrankenWHS Videos share.

We'll see...

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