NASLite Network Attached Storage

I've been running NL-USB for about 2 years now on very old hardware. I've currently got both an additional PATA card, and a SATA card, added to the motherboard, and a total of 7 drives (5 PATA, 2 SATA) loaded up. It's time to update some hardware, as I'm about to update another machine and am planning to move its old hardware to the NL box.

Questions:
1) Do I need to do anything special to make sure that I don't lose any of my data? If I literally just turn off the machine, and swap out the motherboard, cpu, and ram, and plug all the drives into the new motherboard (and the PATA card, I'll still have 1 too many PATA drives for the mobo to handle), will it just boot right back up like normal when I turn it back on? Or will it try to reformat drives or in any way make me lose any of my data?

2) If/when it comes time to swap out a drive that's going bad, can I simply back up that drive to somewhere else, turn off NL, remove the drive - putting the new drive in the same "space" - and reboot? Will this change the order of my drives in NL, or will the new drive just take the place of the old one?

3) Same question as #2, but what if I can't put the new drive in the same space as the old one. ie., I lose a PATA drive and decide to replace it with another SATA drive. Suppose the PATA drive I'm losing is disk-3 (out of 7 disks), when I add the new SATA drive will it show up as disk-3 still, or will it show as a new disk-7, leaving disk-3 "empty"? Or would it shift down disk-4, disk-5, and disk-6 and rename them disk-3, disk-4, and disk-5, thus making the new drive the new disk-6?

Thanks for any help!

Answers in your numbered order:
1) No./Yes./No. ... you had three questions buried in there. They first one is key; answer is No.
2) Yes./No (unchanged order). Again ... two questions ... and it's basically "good news".
3) Would be an issue ...

There is HOWEVER one possible situation your questions missed. Question 1b answer is YES. But there is a possibility that moving from old to new H/W that re-numbering could also occur. There's no way of knowing until you try. It could be chipset dependent, or even BIOS setting dependent (on the new hardware), especially because some BIOSes have "enhanced/legacy/combined/etc" options when it comes to emulating SATA/IDE combination motherboards.

Your question 3 seems to only deal with the situation once you are moved to the new hardware. In that situation the renumbering is very likely to happen. And unfortunately that could become a pain. ALSO NOTE: If you don't already have a backup of the failing drive (under question 2) it may be too late to "simply back up that drive to somewhere else".

Suggestion: BEFORE you move any of the drives, try booting the existing USB stick on the new hardware (no drives attached) and make sure there are no other unanticipated issues (like the NIC not getting recognized) ... then move the SATA and PATA cards with a drive attached (they should work -- but better to try first (new IRQ issues ... etc) ) ... then move the rest of the drives.

Like Georg said.
Renumbering will probably happen. it depends on which controller the kernel finds first, it numbers those drives ... goes to the next controller it finds, numbers those... (you can't change , that's in the kernel, i.e. it will always find the 3ware before the intel ICH)

If you move the NIC over, then you won't have to go through the unlock proceedure.

Yes, copy all the data off that going bad drive. Use the SHARE folder, it's quicker between drives.

Put a folder or text file or something named the Drive1 Drive2 or whatever (at the top of the drive) to help you find it when it's moved to the new system, don't bother trying to get it back the way it was... but you could get lucky. stranger things have happened.

Follow-up: Actually ... even though you can't control the sequence in which the controllers and drives are detected, the first time you move over to the new H/W -- and BEFORE finalizing everything -- you can manually move the drives around by re-plugging the cables until you have the drives in the sequence you want. And with that GREAT suggestion avldwx made (put a text file at the top level with a tell-tale name) this process will be easy.

But what I was trying to warn about is the fact that even a BIOS change could re-sequence the drive order, and of course, as you suspected the replacing of a failed drive. (Or even a drive failing and going "missing" from detection during boot.)

(And I didn't know about moving the NIC and avoiding unlock ... thought other stuff is part of the code too ...)

Hope between all this info we've been able to help ... "Happy (continued) nas-liting !"

Thanks - this is very helpful. I'm actually not all that concerned about having the drive order change. I think I was mainly worried that if the order did change, that for some reason that could cause a problem with NASLite still recognizing the drive as one of its own, and seeing all the data on it appropriately without trying to reformat it something because it thinks the "re-located" drives are new. But it sounds like from what you're saying that this shouldn't be a problem. Regardless of what happens, I shouldn't be losing data just by updating or re-arranging hardware. Correct?

NASLite-2 will "see" NASLite-2 drives which have been moved from one PC to another automatically as every boot is effectively a new installation - the hardware is examined and any drives "marked" as a NASLite-2 drive will be set to the access permissions they had previously.

Fantastic - thanks again for the help.