Topic: Replacing main drive ??

[gtech]

Hi Everyone,
New user so please be gentle and a novice at Linux.

After playing around with various Linux Apps in Virtualbox, I made the jump to installing SME on an old Dell PC, the system works brilliant and is ideal for a small server here at home for us all to share and secure our data.

However, I soon learnt that the drive in the system was'nt going to be all that good, so will be changing it for either a single TB or dual 500Gb drives.

My initial question is how can I go about replacing the existing drive with a new one without having to do a complete reinstall of the system ???  or am I going to be better off just doing a reinstall and configuring with the dual drives ??

Any help or walkthroughs would be appreciated.

Thanks

Graeme

[Stefano]

Hi Graeme, welcome here

I guess you simply install SMe on a single hd without any boot parameters, so you should aleready have a "degraded" single disk Raid1

I strongly suggest you to think about a dual 500 Gb solution: the hd will be setup in a raid1 array, so you'll get about 500 Gb available

so:
1) plug in the first empty hd (of course, you have to shut down your server )
2) go to admin console and choose "manage disk redundancy"
3) it should tell you you have and empty disk and ask if you want to add it: do it
4) let the array sync. it could take some time according to your hd size
5) shutdown your server, unplug your original hd, plug in the second empty hd
6) reboot, go to console again and repeat step 3
7) let the array sync
follow the instructions you find here, in the box

it should work (at least it worked for me many times)

please take some time to read carefully the documentation and to search the forums before posting, thank you

finally, if you find something that doesn't work as expected, please raise a bug in bugzilla (link is above)

[gtech]

That information is superb.....Monday I shall purchase a couple of 500Gb drives and follow your instructions, which I very clear and easy to follow.

This is the disadvantage of being stuck in a "Windows" environment for years.......we miss out on all these excellent Linux applications.....just got to get my head around all the qirks.

Is the easiest way of getting a shell to work with various commands, through WinSCP or something similar ??? or am I missing something at either the server menu screen or through the web screen ??

Many thanks

Graeme

[Stefano]

enable ssh in "remote-access" panel in server-manager interface

then use your favorite ssh client (putty for example)