Obsolete Releases > SME 8.x Contribs

NEED TO ADD EXTRA SATA HDD TO SME SERVER 8.0

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microlatina:
Hello, I have not much experience but I've been using SME server at my office for 6 years now. A very simple standard instalation, with a couple of users and iBays for work. A hardware problem occured and the SATA HDD has problems. The data seems to be intact  but the operating system is lost and it won't boot again. I bought a new 1T SATA HDD and I am about to reinstal a fresh SME 8.

Once I get it up and running, I will need to mount the old SATA HDD and copy as much information as I can get to the new SATA HDD. It is just a manual mount to make this old HDD visible.

The problem is that the information about how to do this across the forum and Googling "SME add extra SATA" , etc. is confusing and mostly related to RAID disks.
I found things like this:

http://forums.contribs.org/index.php?topic=39014.0
http://wiki.contribs.org/Recovering_SME_Server_with_lvm_drives

... but are discouraging and very complicated for a newbie.

Can somebody give me a simple solution to do this ? I think it can't be so difficult.
How can I identify a new HDD in a system and know it is there ?
How can I mount this volume so I can "see" it for a while as a directory so I can locate my old data in it and rescue it by copying to an iBay in the new HDD ?

I will very much appreciate your help.
Thank you

Roberto

purvis:
i do it the hard way longest but maybe the most stable way of transferring files.
when i transfer files to a new system, i use xcopy on a windows xp machine and transfer all files from ibays to as many workstations as can handle the size of the files on the server.

the servers that i set up all use raid1 and i suggest anybody setting up a server to try and at least do that, raid1
if you have done that, raid1, on your server, remove one drive and shelf it for safe keeping,
use the other drive and install it on a windows machine in a external usb enclosure.
as i understand, there is software for the xp to read ext3 formatted drives.
load the software to read ext3, then hopefully you can find and copy the files onto your windows xp machine
then remove the drive that has been formatted with ext3 by shutting down the windows xp machine then at that time remove the drive, i would do this for safety measures.
boot up the windows xp machine, setup up your new ibays, then copy over the files to your new sme8 server

microlatina:
I finally solved the problem by downloading a free program DiskInternals Linux Reader, installing the SATA HDD in my Windows PC, and copying all de data that fortunately was intact.

As I said before I have no technical authority with Linux and SME. I am just a microprocessor hardware and software engineer, with experience in electronics, and just starting with Linux.
Please don't take me bad but I am surprised because I couldn't find any support on this issue among the SME envirnoment. This is a simple thing to do, but all what I found is related to RAID configurations. My machine has just one simple SATA HDD and it is used as a dedicated server and gateway in my office. Just that. I couldn't find support about this very simple issue of adding (mounting) an extra SATA drive to my computer.

Yes, I found good literature to start with for example here:

https://help.ubuntu.com/community/Mount/

It would be nice to find this simple tasks documented somewhere in the SME environment. Maybe I skipped something, but I first Googled and searched the contribs.org forums and found nothing about simple matters like this issue. Maybe SME is for a higher level of expertise users ...

So I will get started with the mount and fstab commands and also something about filesystems, because I don't feel good about solving Linux problems with Windows resources  :o

Kind regards

TerryF:
Providing the old drive was still working and the only problem was not booting, did you try the rescue mode first?  Then add the new drive and let it setup a Raid 1, remove the old drive, have a coffee and bask in the admiration of your co workers :-)

This How To has always worked for me adding a non raid drive to a working system. It is comprehensive and covers all bases, but within it is the instructions to do what you wanted.

Stefano:
this should be applicable too..

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