9 June 2008 - 1:07Big Bad Filer Part 2
Well I am almost completely finished with this project. I was up until about 5am lastnight, and I’m running a little slow today. But atleast I made progress.
I decided to switch my cases, mostly because the silverstone case just wasn’t designed to hold a lot of hard drives. Also working inside it can be a pain in the ass. This went fairly straight forward, with a minor power supply snafu, that was discovered later on in the project.
Once my webserver was in its new home, it was time to get building the file server. Everything seemed to fit nicely together. The drives mounted ok. Thats when I discovered the power supply I had didn’t have enough connectors for everything I needed. Back to the webserver, shut it down, take it apart, swap power supplies, reassemble, etc.
With that out of the way, it was back to the filer, I of course didn’t encounter any further difficulties until boot up time where the system would hang during post. First thing I notice, it seems I have the system drive plugged into the secondary IDE connector on the motherboard, fix it, same result. I began examing jumper settings. Yup, there’s a problem, fix it, same result. Holy moly! I forgot to plug an IDE cable into one of the drives, fix it, same result.
Do you want to know what the problem was? Yeah me too, cause if you left it long enough it would boot, after about the first 8 or so hanging boots, it just started working. No idea why, I can only assume it was getting to know its new hardware. Next it was Windows’s time to complain, also taking forever to boot.
When it finally came up it detected the new hardware, some simple drivers for my controller card and I was on my way. Except the disk management utility also took forever to run. Once that kicked in and converted my disks to dynamic. The final task for me was to create the raid 5 volume, which was a snap.
Pleased with myself, tired, dirty and thankful it was finally over. I decided to leave it resyncing overnight while I got some much needed sleep.
Note: the damn thing is just under 1TB. So close, its just not fair.
[update] It took a couple of days to restore my data, but now that its in place I can rest easy knowing its on a fault tolerant system. As for Joe’s filer I have completely backed it up, so that when Joe gets back he can redo his.
No Comments | Tags: posts