Welcome . . .

to the new and improved Silentk.

The primary focus of this blog is to serve as a technical reference for projects that I have been working on.

The primary audience is myself, but hopefully it can assist others who have similar projects on their table.
Jun 3, 2010

Upgrading the NAS Part 2

Posted by Knick

When I left off last night, I had installed my new drives in my NAS and formatted one of the 2 drives. When the Dlink DNS-323 told me that it had to format the second drive after finishing the first, which took 30 min, I decided that I could not wait any longer and would pick up in the morning before work. While the first drive was formatting I moved one of the old drives from the NAS to my desktop and installed Linux Reader, a tool that would allow my Windows 7 PC read the EXT2 partition on the hard drives.

I woke up this morning all set to begin my 1TB file transfer so it could run while I was at work. I came down stairs, fired up the Windows 7 partition on my PC and launched the Linux Reader application.

I selected the drive that I wanted to restore and told it to copy over to the new partition on the NAS. I left for work hoping that Windows would not jam up and that I would have a nice clean copy of my files on the NAS ready for my use.

There is a reason people like me switch from PC to MAC ....

Apparently the 970GB file copy was a bit too much to handle and it crapped out at about 15% in. I did some more research and tried to find a solution that would allow me to use OSX to mount the drive and copy it over but everything I see is not compatible with Snow Leopard. I decided to give this Linux Reader another try but I am going to restore 1 folder at a time hope that it doesn't crash out again.

2 hours later ... no go. The next step is to get a Linux boot disk made and boot into a Linux OS and try to get the copy running that way. I love how this would have worked in any other version of windows or any other version of OSX but Windows 7 and Snow Leopard are incompatible. I suspect my next blog entry will be, "Running Linux on an MSIx58 with an Intel i7".

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Jun 2, 2010

Upgrading the NAS

Posted by Knick

It happened, I didn't think I could do it but I did. I finally filled up the 1TB of storage on my DNS-323 NAS. I decided this week that I couldn't survive another week with less then 8GB of storage left on my precious network share so I started doing some research to find a compatible 2TB drive to replace the 1TB Hitachi drives that I bought almost exactly 1 year ago. I ordered 2 new Samsung Spinpoint HD203WI 2TB 5400 RPM SATA drives. These drives are not on the offical supported list but several users said they were working great in their DNS-323 so I took a chance and placed the order.

Seeing how Newegg is amazing and knows exactly what I need at all times, the drives were on sale and I saved $15 bucks each and got free shipping. On top of that, since Newegg somehow defies the laws of physics the drives arrived at my house very shortly after clicking the "complete order" button.

Now it was time for the long process of getting the data off the old drives and onto the new share. The process seemed simple (and it was for the most part), remove the old drives, install the new drives, create a new mirror and then copy the data to the new share.

I decided the best way to do this was to remove both the old drives from the NAS. I set one aside for a backup incase something went terribly wrong and I installed the other in my desktop. Then I installed the 2 new drives in the DNS-323 and booted it up. It recognized the drives right away as 2TB drives with no issues whatsoever. I went through the initialization wizard to set up a raid 1 mirror and let it start formatting.

Then I booted my desktop to get the data ready to copy. For some reason, OSX would not mount the drive from the NAS so I decided to give my windows partition a try. Windows (just like OSX) was able to see the drive but unable to read the data because it was a Linux native partition.

To get around this problem I installed a neat little tool called Linux Reader. This application allowed me to see all the partitions (read only of corse) so I could restore the data to the new 2TB share.

Now I can see everything I need to move, but the DNS-323 is still taking its sweet time formatting and configuring the mirrored drives. It is time now to go to bed and kick off the file copy in the morning when the DNS if finished formatting. Hopefully the 1TB file copy process will finish before I get home from work tomorrow.

Special thanks to JP and Eric for helping finish out the last 500GB if it were not for you guys I may have not had to upgrade so soon.

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