Swapping Hardware - FreeNAS 9.2.1.6

[rickdang]

I picked up a new computer with better specs and want to transfer my drives over... one of the drives has FreeNAS on it and I would like to bring that one over as well. Is it as simple as just moving the drives to the new machine and turning it on? Or will I run into issues?

These are the drives I have in there:

1 OS drive (FreeNAS 9.2.1.6)
2x4TB drives running ZFS (Raid 1), with ZVOL to run iSCSI
1x1TB drive

Everything I've searched is for FreeNAS 8.x... where they indicate to export the volumes first (or detach) but of course, a red screen comes up which scares the crap out of me. I'm really new with FreeNAS and admit a lot of it is very technical for me. If there's a better search term I should be using, I'd be happy to use it.

I tried installing a brand new version of FreeNAS onto a USB drive to run on the new machine, but for whatever reason, it keeps crashing to the point where I've flashed the USB drive 3 times now to get it back up and running. Is my best bet to install a fresh version of FreeNAS onto a new drive and bring the volumes over with the config export?

Thanks in advance!
Rick

 

[BigDave]

Is it as simple as just moving the drives to the new machine and turning it on? Or will I run into issues?

The answer is no to the first and yes to the second.

If there's a better search term I should be using, I'd be happy to use it.

imho if you are serious about using FreeNAS 9.2.1.6, you need to study some. Start with the forum stickies and get familiar with
the hardware requirements needed for securing your files. There may be someone willing to help you try and put a server together
but you will get more help if you first learn to help yourself. post your specs for the new machine you are building in a signature,
that way folks can see what you have before trying to help out.

Is my best bet to install a fresh version of FreeNAS onto a new drive and bring the volumes over with the config export?

Sounds like it might be, depending on your hardware choices for the new build...

This may help, from the users guide 9.2.1

1.3.3
Compact or USB Flash
The FreeNAS® operating system is a running image. This means that it should not be installed onto a
hard drive, but rather to a USB or compact flash device that is at least 2 GB in size. If you don't have
compact flash, you can instead use a USB thumb drive that is dedicated to the running image and
which stays inserted in the USB slot. While technically you can install FreeNAS® onto a hard drive,
this is discouraged as you will lose the storage capacity of the drive. In other words, the operating
system will take over the drive and will not allow you to store data on it, regardless of the size of the
drive.
The FreeNAS® installation will partition the operating system drive into two partitions. One partition
holds the current operating system and the other partition is used when you upgrade. This allows you to
safely upgrade to a new image or to revert to an older image should you encounter problems.
USB 3.0 support is disabled by default as it currently is not compatible with some hardware, including
Haswell (Lynx point) chipsets. If you receive a "failed with error 19" message when trying to boot
FreeNAS®, make sure that xHCI/USB3 is disabled in the system BIOS. While this will downclock the
USB ports to 2.0, the bootup and shutdown times will not be significantly different. To see if USB 3.0
support works with your hardware, create a
Tunable
named
xhci_load
, set its value to
YES
, and reboot
the system.
It is highly recommended that when using a USB stick, that only name brand USB sticks are used as
off-brand sticks may not be fully compatible with FreeNAS®

 

[rickdang]

Thanks BigDave. I'm not 100% sure if I'm serious about FreeNAS yet... this is my first NAS. I've always used Windows Server but hated it. I've put a lot of time in setting up my original FreeNAS and have it working pretty good... but upon performance issues, I realized I need more memory for the ZFS to work properly... then also read iSCSI on a ZFS drive was not recommended either. So... that brings me to now, where I'm at the point where all my data is on these drives and I don't know if I should just start over again and re-transfer everything.

That said, I've had no luck getting FreeNAS to work on the newer machine. I tried USB at first and got it running, then it would crash and I wasn't able to reboot without killing the drive and starting over again.

I'm wondering if I should just get more memory for my current system and call it a day now... was hoping that FreeNAS would be something I could easily swap machines incase I ever needed to but it's definitely been more complicated than that. So I agree with you BigDave... I definitely need more study time but am unsure how much I want to commit.

Thanks again for the help!
Rick

 

[BigDave]

It's really ironic but I started out with almost the exact hardware as you, M2N-E, Athlon Dual Core and 4GB!
Went down the Microcenter and bought two WD Red 3TB hard drives and used an old Kingston Datatraveler 4GB
thumb drive to load up FreeNAS on. I've been reading in this forum for 10 months and have come to like having
a machine to store and stream my stuff from:) my hardware has changed dramatically in the last few months though.
I soon realized that if my stuff would one day disappear into cyber space and be lost for ever, I was going
to have to do this the right way and build a server with server grade hardware.
I'm still not done with this build, but I'm learning, and soon will have a first class home NAS that
I put together with my own two hands. I've always enjoyed building stuff and this project has taught this old dog
some new tricks
Welcome to the forum

 

[rickdang]

Yeah, that's my feeling too - I (used to) love building computers and tinkering. Then I got a MacPro and that pretty much ended. No need for a server anymore until I realized how little redundancy I had (time machine and crash plan). Wanted to further protect myself and set up a NAS with mirrored drives that I could iSCSI to my Mac without having to spend on a QNAP or X-Serve solution. Which brings me to today and FreeNAS.

 

[BigDave]

If keeping your files safe are a priority for you, money will be spent regardless of how you go about it;)
FreeNAS is an operating system that costs no money, however the hardware to run it properly will
dive deep into your wallet. To be perfectly honest with you, if I did not love building computers,
I'd just go buy a home NAS and throw some drives in it...

 

[rickdang]

So.... it looks like my new machine is not on the list of supported hardware for FreeNas! Back to square one!

 

[cyberjock]

I have that board and I can tell you that the board:

1. Uses Realtek but worked perfectly in my 2 weeks of using them while waiting for an Intel NIC to arrive.
2. You *can* buy a few lower-end Xeons that are 1366 and drop it in and then it will support ECC RAM. Some are $20 on ebay! You don't need alot of CPU power unless you plan to do Plex transcoding or something like that.
3. I was able to use Registered ECC DIMMs in the board and it worked properly.
4. It is a desktop board, so there are risks of there being problems, but it worked fine for me for about 4 months.

 

[rickdang]

Thanks cyberjock. Will look into it, though sounds like more trouble than it's worth for a system that may or may not work (for the long run). I've been fighting with this machine all day looking up error codes and then finally realized that the hardware was not compatible.

I must have really lucked out with my first machine because if this had been my first time trying to get FreeNAS up and running, I would have given up.

 

[cyberjock]

I had no problem setting up FreeNAS on that motherboard. In fact, I have a USB stick with 9.2.1.6 on it that boots to that board without errors or anything. So I'm not sure what your problem is, but my first guess is you have inappropriate BIOS settings set in the BIOS.

Other than that, I don't know what to say. I wouldn't say it's not compatible, just that its not ideal. If someone built the system with that motherboard and went with one of the compatible Xeons and ECC RAM I would expect them to have a long and fruitful life with the board.

 

[rickdang]

Hmm... your reply had me looking into it a little more this morning and realized that the hard drive I was using may have been the issue, as was the USB drive. I used a different drive and it appears to have installed. Will see how it goes. Thanks cyberjock!

 

[rickdang]

Just wanted to update this thread. I spent most of today getting FreeNAS up and running on the new machine... my biggest fear was transferring the ZFS volumes over from one machine to the the other. Before I attempted this, here's what I did:

1. Created a ZFS volume in the new machine and mounted it and copied a bunch of files to it.
2. Detached the drive from the new machine.
3. Added the drive to the old machine and imported the volume. Big sigh of relief as the import process was flawless and all my files were still there, I could read the drive, write to it, delete files, etc. I had to re-add all the shares though.

So once I was confident this worked with one drive, I did the following:

1. Created a ZFS Mirrored volume with 2 drives on the new machine.
2. Created a zvol on that volume so that I could iSCSI that drive.
3. Copied files to the portion that wasn't zvol'd
4. Mounted the drive to my Macpro through Globalsan and copied more files over to it
5. Detached the drive from the new machine
6. Added both drives to my old machine and auto imported the volume. Another big sigh of relief. I re-mounted the drive on my Macpro through Globalsan and voila, all the files were there exactly like they were on the new machine.

Now that I was comfortable with moving raided ZFS drives around, I proceeded to remove my 2 drives from the OLD machine and put them in the new one, imported the new volumes and set up the iSCSI again on the newly running FreeNAS. All 3TB's of my data were there and everything is working beautifully.

This was a big stress for me as this could have went sideways pretty easily. I threw in another 3TB drive on the new machine and am now using that for my Time machine backups on my Macpro.

Crashplan is currently set up to backup my new NAS and Macpro.

Next step is to use my old machine for backing up my NAS and Macpro via Crashplan locally. I will have 3x2TB drives in there (striped) for a total of 6TB. Once I get all my data backed up to the old machine, I will move it to a different location and have it run offsite backups... well, that's the plan anyways. I know all these backups and redundancy's sound like overkill... but I just can't bare to lose my data.

Hopefully this helps someone else. It appears I am still serious about FreeNAS and hopefully can get the last stage of this working the way I want.

Thanks again for all the help!
Rick