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New DIY Build - Project NORTHSTAR
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Author:  dbone1026 [ Wed Jan 06, 2010 8:11 am ]
Post subject:  Re: New DIY Build - In the Planning Stage

Good to hear. Let us know once the transfer is complete :whs:

Author:  cavediver [ Wed Jan 06, 2010 9:04 am ]
Post subject:  Re: New DIY Build - In the Planning Stage

I'm glad to hear the file transfer is going smooth.

Author:  mgannon [ Wed Jan 06, 2010 9:11 am ]
Post subject:  Re: New DIY Build - In the Planning Stage

Cavediver - since you took the same internal disk-to-disk file transfer approach (for at least some of your data), I'm wondering if you have a rough recollection of the time it took you to transfer. I know we're operating different equipment, different size disks, etc., just looking for a rough gauge here (i.e., it took me __ hours to copy over a 750GB disk).

Author:  cavediver [ Wed Jan 06, 2010 9:25 am ]
Post subject:  Re: New DIY Build - In the Planning Stage

mgannon wrote:
Cavediver - since you took the same internal disk-to-disk file transfer approach (for at least some of your data), I'm wondering if you have a rough recollection of the time it took you to transfer. I know we're operating different equipment, different size disks, etc., just looking for a rough gauge here (i.e., it took me __ hours to copy over a 750GB disk).


I don't remember exactly. That's been 5 months or so ago. However, it can take quite a bit of time to transfer 750 GB of data. Don't be surprised at ~6 - 12 hours or so. It's faster internally than over a network, and the copy speed is variable depending on the equipment. I just started the removal process on a full 2TB drive in Andromeda this morning at 8:00 a.m. I'll let you know when it completes.

Author:  mgannon [ Wed Jan 06, 2010 9:59 am ]
Post subject:  Re: New DIY Build - In the Planning Stage

I thought I might make a couple comments about the SATA controller/driver process on my machine to guide those who might follow. First, a brief re-cap for anyone who hasn't thoroughly read all of the posts above. The mobo for my new machine (Gigabyte GA-EP45-UD3R - Intel Socket 775, P45 chipset - http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.a ... 6813128359) has 8 SATA ports, 6 of which are on an Intel ICH10R controller, 2 of which are on a Gigabyte SATA2 controller. On my first run at setting up the new machine I tried installing the system drive on Port 0 of the Intel controller, and the optical drive on Port 0 of the Gigabyte controller. In BIOS, I set both controllers to AHCI. I put the WHS DVD in the optical drive, everything seemed to be humming along, but then I got an error message ("Could not initialize UI subsystem") before ever getting a chance to F6 the AHCI drivers. I fiddled around for the next hour or so changing the controllers over to different combinations of AHCI and RAID in the mobo bios, always with the same result. After much head scratching, I figured I was probably making things too complicated by trying to hang devices off both SATA controllers, so I moved the optical drive to the Intel controller, and reset both controllers to AHCI in the mobo bios. SUCCESS! Well, at least partial success. I finally got an opportunity to F6 the AHCI drivers. Figuring that I would have only one chance to load drivers for both controllers, I hit F6, selected "S" to specify a driver, loaded the Intel driver recommended in the mobo manual, loaded the Gigabyte driver (there was only one), pressed enter, and I got a BLUE SCREEN. I tried this again with a couple of the other Intel drivers, again in combination with the Gigabyte driver, and got a BLUE SCREEN each time. Recalling how simplifying things advanced the cause the last time, on the next go around I decided to only load the Intel driver (since there were no devices hanging on the Gigabyte controller at this point anyway). SUCCESS! And this time it was for real. Set up completed without a hitch from there on.

Once WHS had fully installed, however, I had no LAN connectivity. Being very tired by this time, of course I figured it must be a cable or router issue, so I screwed around with those for a half hour or so before it dawned on me to try loading the Gigabyte LAN driver. Needless to say, that worked like a champ, and got me on my network, and out to the Internet to start updating WHS to PP3. Once that completed, I tried to load the Gigabyte SATA driver from the DVD that came with the mobo, which worked fine. I moved the optical drive over to the Gigabyte controller, SUCCESS! Next I added the first clean pool drive, followed by the first FrankenWHS pool drive, and that's where we sit at the moment.

Hope this helps someone down the road. The obvious message - KEEP IT SIMPLE, STUPID. :crazy:

Author:  mitch672 [ Wed Jan 06, 2010 11:07 am ]
Post subject:  Re: New DIY Build - In the Planning Stage

I built a machine with that same motherboard about a month ago, except it is running Windows 7 Ultimate, and it has an ATI Radeon 4670 in it, it's my Home Theater PC... It's a good motherboard, and will run almost any intel processor, I have an old Pentium 4 551 in it now, and even that old beast works find for Windows 7 X64 and Windows Media Center.

Mitch

Author:  mgannon [ Thu Jan 07, 2010 8:23 am ]
Post subject:  Re: New DIY Build - In the Planning Stage

:whs: YAY!!! The transfer of the last of my 3 FrankenWHS pool disks completed at about 6:00 this morning. I grabbed screen shots of the Disk Management and Server Storage pages from FrankenWHS before shutting it down a few days ago, and the data volume numbers match up perfectly. I opened a few random files from across the new shares and subfolders, and see no hitches so far.

I did get a little worried last night when I got home, becasue when I looked at the "shares" folders in the second and third pool drives from FrankenWHS, there were definitely some duplicate files (and not in the "WHS folder duplication" sense of the word - I mean files in the shares directories and subdirectories of the now unmanaged FrankenWHS pool drives when browsing them in Explorer on the new machine) to those that had been transferred in the move of FrankenWHS pool drive #1. Not many, and it seemed pretty random (not any particular share or file type). Given that I had a doubly redundant backup plan in place, I decided to plow forward and allow Explorer (in my RDP session) to "replace" any duplicate folders or files as I copied the shares directories from FrankenWHS disks 2 and 3 to the new machine's Shares folder. I suppose there is some risk that an older version of a file might be on disk 2 or 3 and would get copied over the newer file that had already been transfered from disk 1, but give the highly static state of most of the data in the pool, that risk would be very low, and thus manageable. Anyone have any thoughts as to why I would have been seeing duplicates of real files (not WHS duplicates) in the share directories in my 3 removed pool disks? I still haven't reformatted FrankenWHS's drives, so I can post some screen shots of some examples for anyone more skilled than me who is inclined to investigate.

All in all, this process went very, very smoothly, and I owe a big debt of gratitude to those that went before me in documenting their server data transfers (in particular, Damian, Cavediver, and Alex). Although I was prepared to move forward with the Server Recovery migration method documented so ably by Damian and Alex, I am glad that Cavediver stepped in and suggested the method of mounting the shares from the previous WHS in the new machine and simply copying the data over. It might have been slower, but it was probably a safer and more conservative approach. Not that I am suggesting that the other approach is risky, but it is probably a bit more of an "all in" approach. With Cavediver's approach (which does, mind you, make 2 very critical assumptions - first, that your old WHS has adequate disk space to have 100% folder duplication, and second, that your new machine have adequate new disk space to swallow your old machine's shares whole without relying on the old drives), I could set up the new WHS as a clean new build, get it up and running, fully updated, all drivers loaded, etc., before exposing data from the old machine to the new configuration. Only once it was running stably did I start executing the transfer (copy, actually, which is an important point). In the event that the copy of the data from the old pool to the new pool would have failed for some reason, my old pool drives are still 100% intact, and could have easily been installed back into the old configuration. Or, alternatively, I could have taken a run at the Server Recovery migration method as Plan B.

In short (yeah, I know, too late :oops: ), I'd wholeheartedly recommend that anyone who is going to do a migration follow Cavediver's method, assuming your old and new machines have adequate disk space. Damian & Alex, step in and correct me if I'm mistaken about my assumption that the "old" pool drives would be altered as soon as you boot up the new machine in the Server Recovery migration method.

Thanks again to all who assisted me in this process. :mss: :mss: :mss: :cheers:

Author:  dbone1026 [ Thu Jan 07, 2010 8:38 am ]
Post subject:  Re: New DIY Build - In the Planning Stage

mgannon wrote:
:whs: YAY!!! The transfer of the last of my 3 FrankenWHS pool disks completed at about 6:00 this morning. I grabbed screen shots of the Disk Management and Server Storage pages from FrankenWHS before shutting it down a few days ago, and the data volume numbers match up perfectly. I opened a few random files from across the new shares and subfolders, and see no hitches so far.

In short (yeah, I know, too late :oops: ), I'd wholeheartedly recommend that anyone who is going to do a migration follow Cavediver's method, assuming your old and new machines have adequate disk space. Damian & Alex, step in and correct me if I'm mistaken about my assumption that the "old" pool drives would be altered as soon as you boot up the new machine in the Server Recovery migration method.

Thanks again to all who assisted me in this process. :mss: :mss: :mss: :cheers:


Great to hear it all worked out :whs: The biggest challenge with doing the migration as you did would definitely be the amount of data involved. When I moved from my MSS to the DIY WHS I had 8 hdds worth of data to move over. To successfully copy my data from the MSS to the DIY WHS I would have had to buy an additional 4-8 hdds which from a cost perspective wouldn't have made sense. Neither way is the only way, and most important your data is safe and sound on your new WHS!!!

So did you pick out a name yet???

Author:  mgannon [ Thu Jan 07, 2010 8:43 am ]
Post subject:  Re: New DIY Build - In the Planning Stage

dbone1026 wrote:
So did you pick out a name yet???

No, still haven't picked out a new name. Too worried about getting the transfer buttoned up. Nominations?

Author:  cavediver [ Thu Jan 07, 2010 8:58 am ]
Post subject:  Re: New DIY Build - In the Planning Stage

cavediver wrote:
I just started the removal process on a full 2TB drive in Andromeda this morning at 8:00 a.m. I'll let you know when it completes.


Congratulations on your successful data migration! I know you're relieved.

As I promised yesterday, the removal of the full 2TB drive took somewhere less than 8 hours. I started the removal at 8:00 a.m. and when I returned home at 4:30 p.m., it was complete. Sometime during the process, one of my new Samsung drives dropped out of the pool as missing. I had to pull it from Andromeda, insert it in my PC and do a chkdsk /r which took 7 hours. Chkdsk completed and no data was lost. I re-inserted the Samsung drive in Andromeda and all is well.

Author:  mgannon [ Thu Jan 07, 2010 9:03 am ]
Post subject:  Re: New DIY Build - In the Planning Stage

< 8 hours seems pretty good to remove a 2TB drive. It took me about 6 hours to remove a 750GB, but that was on my old machine, and the remaining drives were stuffed to capacity once the drive was removed, which I suspect has an impact on performance.

Whew on your rogue drive.

Author:  dbone1026 [ Thu Jan 07, 2010 9:23 am ]
Post subject:  Re: New DIY Build - In the Planning Stage

mgannon wrote:
dbone1026 wrote:
So did you pick out a name yet???

No, still haven't picked out a new name. Too worried about getting the transfer buttoned up. Nominations?


I would market it to the corporations, see if you can geta sweet endorsement deal :mrgreen:

Author:  yakuza [ Thu Jan 07, 2010 10:23 am ]
Post subject:  Re: New DIY Build - In the Planning Stage

Glad to hear the migration went well, thanks for sharing your experience. 8)

Author:  mgannon [ Thu Jan 07, 2010 1:30 pm ]
Post subject:  Re: New DIY Build - Project NORTHSTAR

dbone1026 wrote:
So did you pick out a name yet???

Paying homage to my home state, I've decided on "NORTHSTAR". Note the change in the name/subject for the thread.

So how do I change the name of the server in WHS now that I've already set everything up? :crazy:

Search, here I come.

Author:  dbone1026 [ Thu Jan 07, 2010 1:44 pm ]
Post subject:  Re: New DIY Build - Project NORTHSTAR

mgannon wrote:
dbone1026 wrote:
So did you pick out a name yet???

Paying homage to my home state, I've decided on "NORTHSTAR". Note the change in the name/subject for the thread.

So how do I change the name of the server in WHS now that I've already set everything up? :crazy:

Search, here I come.


RDP in, right click on My Computer, go to properties, COmputer Name and hit the Change button

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