Problem taking freenas storage disk and making it hd for laptop

[USMCARTY42]

OK So I will admit at the onset this is strange... but I wanted to start teaching myself some networking. We had an old HP laptop laying around.

So I added a thumb drive, loaded freenas onto it and then erased the operating system (windows) and used the hard drive on the laptop as a storage... I know... I know... troll-like.

Anyhow. I am ready to really set up a NAS system - not sure what to use for hardware....


THE QUESTION: Now I would like to restore my HP with the restore disks but everytime I insert them I am told that this is a freenas disk and it wont boot....

Am I SOL?

 

[BobCochran]

Remove the thumb drive. Start the laptop and go into the system setup -- the BIOS, by pressing either DEL, F1, F2, or F10...I'm not sure which key it is for your laptop. Find the screen where you set the boot order, and have the laptop boot first from the CD/DVD drive instead of from removable devices.

Most recent laptops have rescue partitions on their hard drives which contain a copy of the operating system. You can restore the operating system from this. Whether you restore from an OS CD or a hard drive partition, you may also need to type in a product key. I have seen HP systems which would constantly reject their own restore CDs because of software defects in the restore program and/or the defects in the content of the CD.

 

[USMCARTY42]

Well I did that initially however it would still refuse to start saying it was a freenas disk. So I restarted the server and went to storage and deleted that drive as a storage option. Export storage I think....

Now the CD ROM starts but it says that the disk type cannot be copied to. I guess the format in which Freenas programmed the drive prior to export is incorrect because this hard drive is for this laptop which was running Windows before.

 

[JaimieV]

You need to repartition and reformat the hard drive before Windows will install on it.

If you can't work out how to do that with the Windows CD, download any partitioning tool (eg the gparted ISO), burn it to a CD/USB stick, and boot and do it from there.

 

[BobCochran]

To the original poster:

You need to boot from the HP rescue CD. To do that, you must

0. Unplug or remove the FreeNAS thumb drive.

1. Go into the computer's setup program (which is 2. also called the BIOS) and change the boot order so that the system attempts to boot from the CD drive.

2. Put the HP rescue or restore CD (the one that says "Operating System" on the CD label) in the CD drive you pointed the computer to as the first boot device.

3. Save the settings, usually by pressing F10 and then taking the choice for saving changes and exiting.

4. The computer should now boot from the rescue CD.

On an system restore CD/operating system CD for HP systems, I think you have no choice during the reinstall process: the software will automatically do all partitioning and reformatting of Drive C, the system drive, for you.

On an operating system CD that was manufactured by Microsoft Corporation rather than HP, you will need to manually delete all the partitions on the target drive and then reformat them as part of the install process.

Bob