WHS System Reinstall: Saving Sage?

[scat]

Originally Posted by gplasky

Correct. New disk install. Data from pool was kept intact. YMMV so I can't guarantee the same results but the new install recognized the pool. It didn't ask anything about adding drives to the pool, The pool was there on a reboot.

Gerry

Did it show it had to rebuild the tombstones on the D:

Scat

[gplasky]

I don't recall for sure. But I do remember the server was busy for quite a while. (Maybe an hour or so) So when I came back to it everything was there. I have some testing to do that I'm trying to get in this wekend and I'll let you know. This was one of the things I was going to test and document.

Gerry

[PeteCress]

Originally Posted by gplasky

I don't recall for sure. But I do remember the server was busy for quite a while. (Maybe an hour or so) So when I came back to it everything was there. I have some testing to do that I'm trying to get in this wekend and I'll let you know. This was one of the things I was going to test and document.

Not to beat a dead horse but....

Brand-new hard drive.right? i.e. The install created new empty C: and D: partitions?

[gplasky]

Correct. Brand new. Nothing on it. Nada. Empty. Zilch. It had to create the C and D partition. Ran the install and all the updates. I had the pool drives unplugged from the sata connectors. After the install I brought the server down, plugged in all the drives, brought it up and WHS found the pool. After awhile of churning away the box settled down and everything was there.

Gerry

[PeteCress]

Originally Posted by gplasky

Correct. Brand new. Nothing on it. Nada. Empty. Zilch. It had to create the C and D partition.

Went over to Micro Center today and blew a bundle on a couple of 2-tb drives.

My plan is to:

• Replace four of the eight 1-tb drives in my "real" server with the pair of 2's, leaving me with six drives - all connected directly to the mobo so temp info and such gets supplied to Disk Manager
• Put the 4 1's into the faux-NAS box,
• Do a complete backup to to faux-NAS,
• Disconnect all the "Real" server's storage pool drives,
• Do a "New" install on it
• Re-connect all the pool drives
• Re-Boot
• Cross my fingers
• Say a little prayer
• Go to bed
• See what comes up the next morning

If it doesn't work out, I'll restore from faux-NAS; but if I have the same result you did it would be very convenient indeed.

Seems to me that, if somebody is serious about WHS, the second server is a "must-have": for experimenting, for backup in cases like above, and for weekly backups if somebody is not doing daily incrementals on, say, TV recordings - which take up the majority of my space.

Removing drives is even more time consuming than I expected. Couple weeks back I removed a 34%-full 1TB drive from the pool and it took 2.5 hours.

Today I told it to remove a mostly-full 1TB drive at noon and it's been chugging away for over 4 hours as I write this.... no progress message... no screen redraws in the console window..... just looks like the thing is hung or looping.... as it did during that prior drive removal a couple weeks back.

Next one I remove, I will make sure that all share dupication is turned off and I'll hook up both of the new drives to maximize available space in hopes of that speeding up the removal process.

WSH seems tb weak on getting progress/status info to the user. If I hadn't had that experience a couple of weeks ago, I'd be tempted to pull the plug and reboot by now.

Having said that, it sounds like I have a candidate for my first experiment on the second server: tell it to remove a drive, pull the plug after 30 minutes or so, reboot, and see what is or is not still there.

[waynedunham]

Originally Posted by PeteCress

What are you using for a NAS?

After six man hours down the tubes trying to do a WHS reinstall, I have decided to stop trying and just do a new install.

But to do that, I need something to back up my 4+ TB of existing shares/data into.

After pricing a few NAS enclosures, it dawned on me that, if the right parts are lying around (and they are) the cheapest solution for me might be to just build another WSH box and use that instead of a NAS.

I should have been clearer, it's not a true "NAS" its a Ximeta 160gb NDAS. So you need a client on each machine that wants to connect to it. So I really only need to back it up from one of those machines that connect to it, not all of them.

Since I'm running Sage on WHS I guess you could call that my *true* NAS since I have 3tb of storage available. I'm not one to keep a large # of recordings hanging around. I usually delete them after I've watched them. I have probably about a dozen archived recordings.
Plus I only have about 10 DVD's ripped to the system. There will be quite a few more, but I'm not putting my entire collection on Sage. Just the ones I'll watch multiple times. About 90% of my DVD's I watch once and then maybe a 2nd time a year or more later.
I dont' have any small kids around so I don't need all the kiddie viddies loaded up so they can watch Bob the Builder for the 487th time this month.

[PeteCress]

Sounds like the strategy of installing Sage and then copying the .Properties files from a prior installation is sound.

But, reading other threads - and seeing the apparent Linux heritage of Sage, I'm tempted to hope that the Sage install might be file-copyable.

i.e. Sage does not write to the registry and just zipping up Program Files\SageTV and then un-zipping it on another system drive might work - with the caveats that

• The "Service" flavor of Sage might need a little tweak in MyComputer | Manage | Services and Applications | Services.
• One or more .DLLs might also have tb copied from/to System32

Or am I just wishing?

[gplasky]

There are registry settings. For the most part you should be able to install Sage on another system and copy the backup directory over it. What you need to pay attention to is the .properties files and any hardware that moved from one system to the other. If it stayed on the same system then the device IDs and other enumerations would stay the same. But when they move to another PC those could change. So you would do a new install, configure the tuners, IR, EPG, etc until the new install is working. Then you could copy everything from the backup EXCEPT the .properties file. This would get you all your installed plugins back without any configuration/install of them.

Gerry

[PeteCress]

Originally Posted by gplasky

But when they move to another PC those could change

No problem there, I guess bc this install is purely to replace the system drive - which WHS has been saying is on the way out for some time now.

My first attempt will be to image the existing C: and D: partitions, partition the new drive exactly the same, and then try to restore the images.

If that doesn't work - which I kind of expect... then I'll just do a staight-up WHS install followed by HD HomeRun and SageTV installs - and then copy a back of the props over the new install's props.

If the straight-up WHS install hoses my shares, I'll then re-create empty shares and restore them from a second server that contains the same data.

I *think* I'm pretty well covered..... but the truth is that I keep coming up with reasons to delay the big move.

[gplasky]

I would recommend only restoring the C partition image. The tombstones on the D drive will mess you up. If they are not current up to the minute you will loss access to files in your shares as of the time the image was taken. It will be as if they didn't exist. You should be able to do a fresh install of SageTV and then copy back over your complete backup of that directory.

Gerry