Building New Server... How To Move Drives?

Macaroni323

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Oct 8, 2015
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I see many discussions on building a new server and moving drives but all see complicated by other circumstances (live failed server, new server is getting new hard drives or SSD). I have a FreeNAS 11.3 U5 running with and SSD boot and 4 4TB WD Red drives for an 8TB pool. Really simple, no jails, no special features running. It is built on a 15 year old D975XBX2 mobo with a Xeon (in Pentium Pinout) and 8G of ECC RAM. All works fine and I've decided to build a new "official" server. The new machine is an ASRock C3758D4I-4L mobo and Atom CPU with 32GB ECC RAM but I will need to use my current SSD for boot and my data drives (keeping data intact).

I would like to know if I could simply ready the new machine, burn it in (usually run a few diagnostic tools over night) and then simply move the SSD boot drive (without rebuilding the boot drive) and move all 4 data drives without exporting/importing the pool? Simply shut down old server, move the disks, turn on the new server. Yes the data and configs are backed up so I have a recovery plan.
 

danb35

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Macaroni323

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Oct 8, 2015
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Thanks for the reply. This is excellent. I guess the boot drive is like a "live" FreeBSD drive and contains all the drivers that exist. Motherboard/CPU arrives today and memory is already here, and I'm using the old enclosure and PSU (for now). Hopefully I'll assemble and test the system today and overnight (hopefully no disappointing surprises). Tomorrow I'll install the boot and data drives and then scrub the pools.

Thanks for the pointer to the configuration guide. Studying now...
 

Macaroni323

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Oct 8, 2015
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One last thing... I probably should start a new thread but making last minute power measurements on the old server (160-170W) I noticed an error at boot. The machine seems to work OK but I thought I'd check this error before disturbing the hardware. I see a "gptzfsboot: error 66 lba 234441640". Looks like something in the boot drive?
 

Macaroni323

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Oct 8, 2015
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danb35...
Thanks for your help. Just wanted to let you know the outcome. FreeNAS 11.3 U5 back up and running. It was as painless as you indicated. Had to select lagacy boot since the existing drives were from a non-UEFI machine. Old machine 160-170W... New ASRock C3758D4I-4L running 63W at it highest (with 1 120GB SSD and 4 WD-Red 4TB drives).
 
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