My NAS finally filled up with all those things I collect and all the CD-DVD I burned over the years and have now transferred to my NAS. 500GB seemed like a good idea at the time of designing it, but evidently it just wasn’t up to the task. So I upgraded it to a 1TB of storage space. Samsung SpinPoint T166 500GB times three on a Raid5 setup is just what the doctor ordered.

However there was the issue of what to do with the other disks. This was the beginning of a two day process. To start with, here is what my old setup was like in both my main and NAS systems:

So this is what I decided to do: The old SpinPoints will go to a RAID0 in my main system (drives F and G), the Raptors will take up the job of C, D and E drives and the 120GB Western Digital will go to an IceBox external enclosure. Talk about a difficult move.

First of all I had to do some research to make sure that one could move a RAID array. After many hours I found a few articles that basically said “[…] if every hardware component of your array (controller, bios, disks, connections etc.) are moved, then there is a good chance that the array will survive – still take some backups […]”. That was not very reassuring though. So even though I had everything burned to DVDs there was still the element of fear; who wants to copy 500GB from DVDs and CDs anew?

So I unscrewed the hard drives and did not disconnect them from the XFX Revo controller and I installed the controller to the main system. Luckily enough the main system has loads of juice to run the disks so it didn’t even blink when it was asked to run 6 disks at once.

A few hiccups later, the array was working perfectly. That was all the risky work done and I thought the rest of it was going to be a breeze. Only one hour had passed and I was certain that the whole upgrade would be over in a few more.

Final hardware steps; install the newly purchased XFX Revo to the NAS with the new T166’s. Again, flawless installation and array creation. This is one of the best hardware pieces I have ever had the pleasure of working with. All that was left was to copy 500GB from the main system to the 1TB array in the NAS. I thought it was going to be quick, after all I had a Gigabit Ethernet installed and the copying was happening from one raid to another (RAID5 is basically a RAID0 with a safety feature, which means the speed of reading/writing is vastly improved over that of any one disk). However it would stubbornly insist on only transferring 20MB per second. I still do not know what happened, but after a few tweaks in the network setup of both computers I managed to increase it to 40MB/sec (CISCO academy education put to good use…) but it was still low considering that in the past I have been able to copy from the NAS at the speed of 70MB/sec. Needless to say, it took some time…

When that was done (thank you Babylon 5 DVD sets for providing some entertainment during the wait) the NAS was ready. One part complete. Now to fix up the main system.

Moving the partitions around was going to be tricky – and dangerous – but I could not be bothered to build the system from scratch and so that was the only other way. After a lot of research – one phone call – and careful consideration – about 5 seconds – I bought this amazing piece of software: Acronis Disk Director Suite. It allowed me to resize the partitions to fit in the Raptors (C and D drives were 56GB and had to fit in a 35GB disk, and E drive was 60GB also to fit in a 35GB disk). Game partitions were no biggie as they easily fit in two logical partitions in the 500GB array.

The resizing was amazingly easy and quick and safe. I could not be happier. Now all I needed was to transfer the partitions to their new home. Enter Norton Ghost which had served me well in other likewise situations (transferring of the system partition to a new disk). Only this time it did not want to cooperate. I copied the partition and tried to boot from the Raptor, but the bios would not seem to want to! It kept going at the very end of the boot disk sequence and would still boot from the original system disk. Just in case, I removed the old system disk and the system just said “No System Disk found” and stood there.

I was beginning to worry. I knew that it was not a hardware failure, since I had taken steps with Acronis to make the Raptor’s partition Active (translation: your boot disk carries a marker that tells your system that this is a disk you can boot from) so the only conclusion was that Ghost messed up!

In all frustration I plugged back the old system disk and the system booted once more. At least there was that… I tried to look around in Ghost, help files, system options, anything, for a clue as to why it was not able to do what it previously did so well, but it was not looking good.

I don’t know what made me go back to Acronis, it must have been a desperate hope of maybe finding something there that would explain the problem. Instead I found the solution. Acronis had a feature to COPY partitions but I thought that this would mean to copy the partition information, not the data in the partition, due to the Ghost’s copy option that does just that. However, it was not the same.

Acronis’s copy partition was just what I needed. The Raptors were now booting up the system and everything was perfect. A few resizes later (because I had intentionally made the old partitions 30GB to ensure they would fit) and the new system was ready too.

Final Thoughts: did all that save me time? Probably not, a fresh install would be faster, but I have a system that is full of little utils and apps that are just too many to know what data to backup before a fresh install. I know it is good for a PC to be formatted every now and then, especially one that is running like mine with so many apps and uninstalls and demos and shareware try-outs, but every time I format I loose something. This is why I’m glad I will be going to the army in a few months. It forces me to not upgrade CPU-M/B now and so when I’m done with the army it will be Aug 08 and Vista will be better and new hardware will be available and I will be able to put this machine together from scratch while my current PC will take on an other role. It will be modified to not run all those thing it is now running, but nothing will be removed from it. All files and utils (especially those that do not require an install to work so people place them in all the weird places then can think of or have space for) will remain in the system and I will be able to retrieve them. Yes I’m paranoid, but I don’t care 😛

What will most likely happen is this:

New Computer = main system

Current main system = NAS

Current NAS = media center

P.S. also, by the time I’m back from the army I’m hopeful that Wireless N devices will be part of an IEEE protocol and work better for streaming media than all the other wireless junk out there right now. That will make a wireless media center worth while…