Older RAID controller and new drives

[jason4207]

I'm running 4.7. What do you mean by "right combination"? Is it not booting? Did you read the tutorial? Did you set the BIOS to boot from the flash drive?

The network will definitely be your bottleneck. But if your backing up over night and not in any kind of hurry it won't really matter. If you have to restore you will want Gb LAN to get back in action faster, but if you have other PCs it may be a mute point.

With only 3 drives you can just use the Intel controller on your mobo and disable the Silicon Image controller.

 

[BachOn]

I'm also trying 4.7. Yes. I did read the tutorial. I copied the contents of the extracted Zip archive over to my formatted Flash drive. My Flash is one of their approved models. But when I boot I get a No Boot Manager message. I have set the BIOS to read the Flash drive first. And yes, I did click on the file named Make_Bootable. I haven't given up yet. But I haven't got it to run yet. I'm still waiting for the 3rd Hitachi drive. (The motherboard is set for USB 2.0. One Q&A I read suggested trying to boot with the BIOS set for USB 1.0. I haven't done that yet.)

This is an Abit IC7 Max3 motherboard with 6 SATA1 ports. Two are for the external RAID but can be set for simple IDE. The others are for the onboard Intel controller. The motherboard also has older IDE ports. But I decided not to use my smaller hard drives. I think the largest is maybe 400 Gb. And I'll have to go to the paid version for four drives. I'm trying to make do with the free version until I determine if this is the right program for my needs.

I hope to use FBackup to make both mirror images AND store data on the UNRAID drives. I was thinking making monthly mirror images of each computer. Then I'd do twice weekly backups of the data files. For restores, I figured to temporarily hang a drive on a working machine and run the restore. Then I'd plug the drive in the machine where it belongs. Does that make sense to you? Any suggestions for any of this are welcome. Ego is not my problem.

BO

 

[jason4207]

During boot press F12 or whatever it is on your mobo to bring up the boot menu. If the flash drive is listed then see if it works that way. You don't have to wait for the 3rd drive to get it working. It's pretty easy to add drives later.

It's been quite a few years since I messed with this, but the guys on the lime-technology forum are very helpful. Try posting there if you can't figure it out.

I just leave the drive in the machine it's going into. I use Acronis backup software and you can easily create a bootable CD/DVD using their program. Then boot to the disc on the machine you want to restore to and select the network location where the image backup is located. Then just walk away and let it do it's thing.

The method you outlined will also work just fine, though.

I would stick with the free version for now as well. Try it before you buy it. That's what I did.