Replacing System Drive?

[jbmia]

Hi guys,

Not sure if this is the best place for this. If not, please advise... I'm currently testing Amahi with Greyhole as a WHS replacement and have a question...

One of the major issues I have with WHS is the challenge you can have if your system drive goes bad. In my case, the WHS reinstall routine did not pick up that I was reinstalling the OS only and wanted to do a complete reinstall. This meant I had to move approximately 4 Terabytes off the WHS storage pool drives temporarily and copy all that data back to them once the install was complete and they were re-incorporated into the storage pool. In other words, if WHS doesn't see it's a reinstall and wants to do a complete install, each drive as its added back at installation, gets wiped out and reformatted. And there's no way around it. To compound matters, you've inevitably got portions of file folders spread across drives, and it really is a royal pain sorting it all and getting back up and running... Took me about 2 weeks off and on..

Sorry for the book above, just wanted everyone to know where I'm coming from.. Here's my question... Will I have to go through this or a similar process with F12 (or Fx) and Amahi? I'm not including my system drive in the storage pool at all. I'd like to be able to just pull a bad system drive, perform a complete reinstall of F12 & Amahi + any apps I need, and re-add my dedicated data drives into this new storage pool with no extra effort like I have with WHS above. It seems like it would be possible, but I want to confirm.

The thing that confuses me is, when I performed my install, it seems like I couldn't get F12 to recognize my data drives unless I deleted the old partition and created a new one and then ran hda-diskmount. I could be wrong, but it seemed like I couldn't get a UUID for the drives until I went through that process. Obviously, if a repartitioning is required then we're back in a similar process to the WHS scenario described above. Can anyone confirm or deny? Outline a process? If anyone can outline a process, I'd be happy to document it and help with updating the Wiki...

Regards,

jbmia

[drissical]

Im interested in this also, not for the same reason however, i want to change the domain name that the server uses which as I understand it is easier to just reinstall and also just for future reference.

From what I gathered on the forums; Disconnecting storage drives, Installing fedora + amahi, connecting the drives and mounting them, adding the drives to the storage pool (which Im pretty sure does not do anything to the data just tells GH to use the freespace here) then creating the same exact shares and then magic happens.

I have not done tried any of it yet but that is what i was going to head in with when that time came.
Please correct me if im wrong though

[gboudreau]

The procedure detailed above is correct. Here's more details.

- Disconnect all data drives before you reinstall. This will prevent you from destroying them by mistake during the Fedora/Amahi install!
- Install Amahi per the regular instructions.
- Connect the data drives, and use hda-diskmount to remount all of them.
Note that if you can, it would be faster if you can re-mount the drives in the same paths they used to have.
Example: If you have one 1TB and one 2TB, and the 1TB was mounted as /var/hda/files/drives/drive1, and the 2TB was mounted as /var/hda/files/drives/drive2, it would be better to re-mount that like that on your new HDA. If you mount them otherwise, it will still work, but Greyhole will work a while to re-build the links in your share before they can be usable.
- Select the drives in the Amahi Dashboard: Setup > Shares > Storage Pool
- Re-create your shares in the Amahi Dashboard: Setup > Shares.
Make sure to select 'Use Pool', and select the correct number of extra copies.
If you don't remember all the shares you had, just check inside the 'gh' folder found at the root of your drives to get a reminder!
Example:

Code: Select all

ls -1 /var/hda/files/drives/*/gh/ | grep -v : | sort -u

- Launch a fsck to have Greyhole rebuild your shares.

Code: Select all

greyhole --fsck

Until this completes, some of your files will be missing from your shares.