Installing on a 3TB main drive

[nickdanger3d]

I just wanted to document and share my experience installing Amahi.

I'm using a MediaSmart Server ex485 and wanted to get a 3TB drive, which WHS supports, so I chose Amahi as a replacement.

I was using my htpc, a core i5 box with uefi. I struggled for a day or two trying to install from a flash drive, since I don't have a cd/DVD drive. The problem was that the iso i wrote to the flash drive always tried to boot from my internal drive (which I first put Ubuntu on so i didn't need to keep reconnecting disks), except for the Express CD but that formatted my drive as MBR.

Eventually I broke down and borrowed a USB CD drive.

Next, I had trouble with the partitions. I couldn't make the drive GPT from the installer, so I used a parted magic disc to do that. I made a /, a swap, and a data partition. The f14 installer allowed that, and did the install but the drive wouldn't boot. (this part took the longest to figure out) I had to make a /boot partition for it to use. I don't really understand why I needed to waste 500MB for /boot, but that was the default value so I kept it.

Once I had a /boot partition, everything worked fine. I can't find anywhere saying that F14 needs a separate /boot partition, but apparently it does. Interestingly, F16 also needs one (well I think its just recommended) but it's a bios_boot partition and only needs to be 2MB. The F16 partition did not work with F14 though, I needed the larger ext2 formatted partition.

Incidentally, the ">2.1TB drives" wiki page was not helpful for installing on a big drive, but I wouldn't mind updating it to include steps for installing on a main drive that big if I was given a wiki username.

I do have one question about migrating from WHS - I made my data partition NTFS so I could read it on Windows if for some reason I need to go back to WHS. Is this a bad idea? Additionally, I was wondering if I could just make a symlink to point the whs shares folder to the gh/ folder so I wouldn't need to copy the data from my other drives, just mount it and have greyhole pick up the files

[sgtfoo]

Having a NTFS partition is fine, but you would benefit from ext4 instead as it's more Linux native.
If your mother tongue was English, and you learned French in school and seldom used it, which language would you be better working with? (analogy there)


To update the wiki, you just need to sign up as a contributor in the wiki site.

Greyhole already uses a lot of symlinks. If you're an advanced user, I would say go nuts and symlink all you want. Adding a symlink into a system that is meant to manage files for you with its own symlinks feels like an over-complication of things.

I don't mean to twist your arm, but perhaps work on a decision for how you would prefer to store your data.
Test out Amahi and WHS and assess which one works best for you, all while keeping a copy of your crucial data on a seperate drive entirely that could be incorporated into your server of choice after the fact.

We've seen many users not enjoy Fedora / Amahi when coming from WHS in the forums and even with plenty of help and advice, would drop Amahi for preference of how they would rather do things. We've also seen the opposite. The best advice is to either choose one over the other, or devise a system of your own that uses both.....
For example I know a guy who has a virtual server that has a RAID array that feeds both his Linux AND Windows -based servers so as to keep all the data in one place, but have the benefit of both systems.