Help with migrating from dead hardware

[Michael Nystrom]

Just finished moving and my FreeNAS system is DOA. Fairly sure the old and abused rack server didn't take the stress of the move. (no output on either monitor ports when trying to boot to various media.)

From memory (as my notebook is still packed) the system consisted of an ancient Xeon 1U rack server (Dell?) with 8GB or 16GB memory, booting from a USB drive via a boot CD. Inside I had 2 new (at the time) multigig (3GB?) red WD drives configured as a RAID0. I did periodic upgrades within FreeNAS, so the version should be less than 12 months old.

I think the new system will be a new Dell PowerEdge T20 with 16GB memory.

From reading other threads, it sounds like I can try to just move the USB drive and two hard drives to the new system and see if it boots up. Is that a possibility?

While I'm building the new system, I was thinking of creating a new boot USB drive (and a mirror, too.) Should I directly do this and see if I can recognize the hard drives, or wait to see if the original USB drive is working.

Finally, if the hard drives can be recognized, can I try to read each of them separately on a different system to copy the data? All of the data is duplicated online, but I don't want to have to recreate a local copy via download.

Thanks,

Mike

 

[Robert Trevellyan]

3GB?

3TB, I would assume.

RAID0

Hopefully, you mean mirror, which is similar to RAID1. The ZFS analogy to RAID0 is a stripe, which has no redundancy. If that's what you did, this would be a good opportunity to backup the data and rebuild the pool.

it sounds like I can try to just move the USB drive and two hard drives to the new system and see if it boots up. Is that a possibility?

Yes, that should work. Depending on how the network was configured, you might have to fiddle with that, but everything else should be smooth sailing.