new unRAID setup on existing windows machine

[davidb]

I am wanting to try out unRAID and would like to use an existing machine that has windows 7 on it. It currently has 2 hard drives that windows uses but I can put a new 6TB or so 7200 rpm hard drive in it. I also have a spare 128GB ssd I could put in if it could use it. As i see unRAID runs entirely in ram then I am assuming when I want to run unRAID I can just boot off the flash drive and when I want to run windows just shutdown unRAID, remove the flash drive and boot windows. I am hoping that unRAID won't do anything to the windows drives and windows won't do anything to the unRAID drives! Is this true?

I want to use one hdpvr for this but I am probably one of the strange ones as I still use a serial port to change channels on my directv box. The machine has hardware serial port on the motherboard and on the end of the serial cable to the directv box I use a serial to usb adapter. This has been a trouble free setup for 9 + years with 2 hdvprs on my main windows sage machine. Can I do this with unRAID? My hdvpr has the optical input to get 5.1 sound, will I be able to get 5.1 audio with the setup?

I have a pfsense router in my house and have it configured for 2 subnets. The above machine will have be on a 192.168.1.x subnet and the rest of the house is on a 192.168.0.x subnet. From both subnets I can ping devices on the other subnet and get replies so I do have connectivity between them. I have several hd200/300's that I would like to just change the ip address of and be able to test out and then go back and forth between sage servers. Will this give me any problems.

After I get all this installed then I would like to get the Microsoft dot net core installed. I assume this won't break the above setup?

Sorry for so many questions but the more I get figured out upfront the less trouble I will have!

David

[stuckless]

unraid does run from USB/RAM. When you start it, you need to configure the drives. So, it's really up to you if keep drives separate from each OS. YOu'll just need to know which drives you are accessing from each OS, and keep them separate.

[BobPhoenix]

If you do NOT mount the Windows drives in unRAID then they should be fine. I would worry more about Windows trashing the unRAID drives then Visa-Versa. But as long as you don't get into Disk Manager and initialize the unRAID disks you should be fine dual booting between the OS's. I booted unRAID on an older notebook when I first tested it out and then pulled the flash and booted into Windows again just fine. Note you probably could just get into the bios and flip the boot device between your Windows Boot HDD and the unRAID USB flash drive. You don't need to remove USB flash drive when you boot Windows. You just have to be careful not to trash the unRAID boot flash when in Windows since the flash drive format is readable natively in Windows. If there are problems on the flash one of the most commonly recommended things to do when flash corruption is suspected is to take it to a Windows box to run a check disk on it.

One thing about HD-PVRs and unRAID. They do work with unRAID but I was not able to get 5.1 sound and good recordings as often as I can when I use a Windows VM and a SageTV network encoder for the HD-PVRs. When I had HD-PVRs hooked up directly to unRAID I only got 50% or less good recordings with 5.1 sound. When I had it set for Stereo the recordings from my HD-PVRs worked fine on unRAID. Cannot tell you about serial tuning at all. I use HTTP tuning for my DirecTV boxes from my unRAID SageTV dockers.

Can't answer the pfSense etc... questions. I doubt they would cause a problem but I don't know so maybe wait for someone who does know.

[KarylFStein]

When you turn on the HD300, (and guessing HD200), just stop the autoconnect and tell it to connect to the server you want. Same for the Android mini-client. Two servers on the same subnet is fine.