Replace Motherboard in working Freenas Server

[Robert ikin]

I've been using Freenas on an old Dell machine (Optiplex 780) for about a year, I'm really happy my present Freenas configuration and it's performance. However the motherboard has only two internal SATA ports one of which I recently discovered is broken, I want to install a second HD with the possibility of further storage expansion (not happy using SATA expansion card). I have a Gigabyte GA-G41MT-S2P (4 SATA ports) kicking about that I would like to put in the Dell box using the existing memory, cpu and HD. Can I do the swap without losing the data on the HD and keep the current install config on the USB stick or is it an upgrade from the current version CD or a complete reinstall job of the Freenas OS and plugins

 

[depasseg]

If you've followed the guides here, and are sure you haven't used any sort of HW RAID, you can move your data drives and system USB stick to a new machine.

 

[danb35]

The only thing you might need to do is reconfigure your network, if (1) the NIC on the new mobo uses a different driver than the NIC on the old one, and (2) you'd manually configured it. Other than that, it should be plug and play.

 

[AVB]

It should be plug and play but like anything else plan for the worst. Make sure you have a good backup of the data and your config before starting. I'll be doing the same thing next week :)