On Tue, 10 May 2016 09:19:52 +0100 steve-ALUG@hst.me.uk wrote:
On 03/05/16 11:30, Chris Walker wrote:
I have been given a new(ish) PC. It's an i7 with 16GB of RAM. It currently has Windows 10 on a 128 GB SSD and has a couple of 1TB hard drives configured under Windows as RAID1 - they show up in the BIOS as RAID.
[snip]
If it helps, I've pulled the drive out and hooked it to my current machine via a USB adapter and it appears that it's a regular NTFS drive. But should there be any extra partitions or files on it to denote that it's part of a RAID array?
Probably, but how to find out? You'll have to look at any raid documentation that comes with the machine. If it's BIOS based, then don't expect much help as BIOS documentation is usually poor English and lacking in depth in my experience.
The machine didn't come with any documentation as it was left to me in a will. Sadly the owner passed away last year and his wife is clearing out all his old stuff - she's filled 3 skips so far!
I'll pop off the side cover again on the PC and take a look at the motherboard markings and grab a handbook from the manufacturer's site.
I also intend to have my /home partition on a separate 1TB drive. The installation on this machine has Windows 10 on a 500GB hard drive with Mageia on a 1TB drive. I'm thinking that I might just bung that drive in to the new machine and at some point remove the extra partitions from it leaving just the /home on there.
Once I've installed Mageia on the new SSD, is it as simple as amending the fstab file to point to that 1TB drive?
Could be. Tip. When adding/removing disks, drive letters will change sometimes necessitating changing the fstab to accomodate this. Consequently, they added a feature to fstab to allow you to identify the drive and partition using the UUID (Unique Unit Identifier) - basically a ID code for the partition. As long as you don't reformat the partition, the ID should remain the same. Consequently if you use fstab to say that the /home partition is in UUID=YXZ, then it will find it irrespective of drive letter, (sda1, sda2, sdb1, sdb2 etc).
A new 512MB SSD is arriving this morning according to the text message I received this morning from Scan. So I can have a play then.
Or should I do something different altogether?
Do you need raid? I have it. It adds reliability, but it also adds complexity. I wish I'd formatted my disks differently as I have partitions of a particular size. I gather that you can use LVM (Logical Volume Management) for more flexible partition control, but I have no idea how.
I already have a NAS with RAID on it so I'm beginning to think that I'll just remove the pictures from the new i7 machine (I need to keep those for his family in Australia) and wipe the RAID (once I can get into the BIOS) and just use the discs as normal.
I think the BIOS problem relates to the keyboard. The machine doesn't recognise the Ctrl-I keys when held down at the start but I'll just have to borrow the keyboard from a Raspberry Pi to see if that works instead.