james2246

Sorry @TehDwonz that I didn't respond earlier, I procrastinated for a bit while I tried gathering more information. And then when I did get started it took days. The whole thing was really a nightmare, though not as bad as it could have been. And sorry this post is so long, but I wanted to be thorough because the other reason I wanted to reply to this topic is so it wasn't just another post with no resolution, especially because afaik there is none on this topic anywhere on the internet. So, long story short, it can't be done. And I would think if it were at all possible it would have been in my case since the two boards were both the same chipset (even both Gigabyte brand). Maybe if the the two motherboards were exactly the same brand and model, but I don't see why anyone would ever test that. I made the clone onto the WD Black and then since I had that I was feeling brave and hoping to tell people if even the mirrored setup would survive so I tried hooking up both SSDs initially. It BSODed, although it did recognize an OS was there, it wouldn't boot. Kept saying my OS was damaged and needed to be repaired. I removed one SSD and attempted repairs, but it said it was unable to fix the problem. Then I tried the other just to be certain, same thing. So I ended up reinstalling Windows on one of the SSDs, but I was still hopeful about retaining all my Plex metadata & thumbnails since I still had two other backups. Once booted into Windows I followed the official Plex guide for moving the installation to another system, only this time I moved the entire Plex Media Server folder from the second SSD to the the one running Windows. I did this because as I said earlier in the thread, I'd previously tried moving only the metadata and media folders as the guide says and it did not work. It took 8 hours to move 1.4 TB, even SSD to SSD, because it was almost entirely random reads & writes of tiny files. But in the end it worked and I kept my original Plex configuration. Now back to the topic of the thread, reestablishing the mirrors. Technically I've done it, though I'm still considering doing it all over again. This is because I found out that once you convert a disk to dynamic, it can't be changed back to basic without total data loss. EaseUS Partition Master claimed to be able to do this, but every time I tried it said it needed to restart for changes and when it did it always said, "Message(8196):The present device configuration and the previous configuration do not match. Press any key to reboot!" The other two methods, Disk Management and CLI, are both guaranteed to lose all data so I didn't try them. Well I did, but only on the second SSD after Windows was reinstalled on the first and all my data was moved over. You see, when I reinstalled Windows on the fist SSD, it was still a dynamic disk and still contained the system and recovery partitions of the original install. These cannot be removed from a dynamic disk unless you convert it to basic first, which would result in total data loss on the entire drive. So on each boot it still presented the option to boot into the original and original backup OSes which would not work on the new machine. This isn't really a problem, since the partitions are so tiny (100 MB & 15 MB), and I even was able to remove them from even showing up on each boot using MSConfig. But still the drive has 5 partitions instead of the 3 it should. This is easy enough to fix however, since I had to destructively convert the second SSD to Basic in order to reestablish the mirror, so that drive only has the 3 partitions it should. I've confirmed the mirror works with it though by choosing to boot from it instead of the primary. So if one really wanted to get rid of the other two partitions on the original, the steps would be: 1 - Reinstall Windows on one of the SSDs 2 - Copy all needed data to that SSD from the second 3 - Destructively convert second SSD to Basic and delete all partitions 4 - Remove original SSD and reinstall Windows a second time on the second (now Basic) drive. 5 - Put first SSD back in and again copy all data to second (now primary boot SSD) 6 - Destructively convert original (now secondary) SSD to Basic and delete all partitions 7 - Reestablish the mirror, converting them both back to dynamic in the process I stopped after step 3 and mirrored to the original SSD (with the extra System & Recovery partitions), partly because at first I didn't realize how I could fix it till it was already being done, and now because I just don't feel like going through all this again when it's all working. And the only real downsides (that I can see) are losing 115 MB of space, and knowing that those other boot options are there, even if I made it so I can't even see them. And since I set the order to be the new primary, then the new backup, then the original two, the only way it would ever even get to them is if both SSDs failed simultaneously, in which case they too would be gone by that point anyway. A final note for all StableBit DrivePool / Scanner users, your original activation keys will not work, and you'll have to email them to ask for the keys to be reauthorized. I did so and they wrote me back a few hours later saying the keys were reactivated. And even in the mean time you can restart your 30-day trials so you won't have any downtime on them. DrivePool will recognize and reestablish your original pool just by recognizing the PoolPart folders on your disks. I actually haven't even reactivated them though because I've got 30 days and I'm still trying to find out if there's any problem with leaving those extra two partitions. If there is and I have to reinstall again, I don't want to have to be a pain and email them again, they might think I'm trying to get multiple licenses or something. So that's everything I think. If anyone knows about some downside to having reinstalled Windows on a Dynamic disk that already had the system & recovery partitions on there that can't be removed, I'd appreciate the heads up.

EaseUS Todo Backup doesn't appear to support network drives, which is annoying because I'll have to move the 2TB WD Black from my gaming PC to my NAS which is completely full of drives. I guess I don't need any data drives attached anyway if I'm only cloning the boot drive, but it means my server will be down a lot longer. Especially since I have to back it up to spinning rust. I will get it done though, unless I missed something in EaseUS or if perhaps there's another easy backup program that supports network drives?

Meant to include this in the pic of my free space, but couldn't understand why the metadata folder was so small. It's actually the media folder that contains all the video preview thumbnails that take up so much space.

Thing is though, I did have one fail on me. I set this up not just so I could restore, but to ensure no interruption if it did happen again. But I agree you're right about also having an actual backup as well. The metadata builds up very slowly over time, so upgrading the SSDs wasn't something I was planning to do right now.

No I don't, and you're right I should and will. Like I said though I do have an empty 2TB WD Black in my gaming PC I could use for now. I can always buy another SSD later. I'm going to need to upgrade the size of my boot SSDs on the plex server pretty soon anyway.

Yeah sorry for the confusion, I replied without thinking about it, I just realized I don't have the space on the SSDs for it. It is my sincerest hope that you're right and I'm worrying about all this for nothing. I just want to be ready in case that's not the case. It really is crazy to me that there is absolutely no documentation for this on the internet, at least that I can find. And I've been looking for the last 2 days. You'd think with a the tutorials on how to set it up there'd at least be one on how to move it. Hopefully it's because it just works like you said and is therefore unnecessary.

Oh wait I just realized I can't do that. There's far too much metadata on the 2TB SSDs to have two copies of it. I'm going to have to pick one or the other. I thank you again for your help but right now I'd feel more comfortable just making a whole drive image backup than trying to learn this VM stuff.

Ok thank you, might seem like I'm being paranoid but I'm going to figure that out too, even though I'll be first trying to just move them. But after I've set up this hyper-v or proxmox and copied plex into it. I will of course make a backup as TehDwonz suggested.

[1] This seems like the best option, or at least the one that will make me feel safest about doing it. [2] I specifically tried exactly that once before. Plex was originally on my gaming pc but it only took a month or two before I realized how bad on an idea that was, so I copied the metadata folder, installed plex on the system I'm using now, and dropped the folder back in. Don't know why but it didn't work so I don't want to try that again. wasn't a big deal at the time though because there wasn't much there. Now it would be a nightmare. [3] I refer again to [2] [4] Yes of course! I use it to keep a close eye on all my drives, let's me know they're doing ok:

Well I already bought everything, just still waiting on the HBA and sff-8088 cables to arrive so I can hook up the SC847. But since the motherboard is here I can do that part now. This can be done on Windows? It was awhile ago but I recall when looking into other options like UnRAID, FreeNAS, etc., that running VMs required a LOT of RAM, ECC specifically iirc. Other than the time it would take to learn all that, I didn't do it because it would have defeated the goal I had at the time of just using my old gaming PC internals for the plex build since I was upgrading then.

That sounds like a good precaution, and the kind of thing that would make me feel better about it. I will look into how to use this EASEUS ToDo Backup. I don't have another SSD, but I assume it'd be fine to use a 2TB WD Black I have? Do you mean just copy the Plex folder and drop it back in after reinstalling Windows? Because I tried that once before and for whatever reason it didn't work for me and I had to recreate everything. Between that and the time my SSD died, this would be the third time I had to do it. Only it's been a long time and now there is a lot more media on there. Or did you mean using another backup tool like the EASUS? My current setup has 16 drives through the 16i, and I just bought a SuperMicro SC847 JBOD. I didn't like the idea of running another 45 drives through the same 8 channels. Being honest I have no idea what a hypervisor is and no experience running VMs. I know I could learn it if I have to, but the whole reason I stuck with Windows, Drivepool, and SnapRAID is so I wouldn't have to. Everything's worked great for me so far.

It's Windows 10 64 bit with the latest updates. It's 2x 2TB SSDs, CPU is a 7700k, 16 GB of RAM, LSI 9201-16i, and new motherboard is a Gigabyte GA-270x. I'm moving to that board because I needed a second PCIe x16 slot for another HBA (LSI 9201-16e). Moy current board only has the one.

This is also my plex server and it contains a huge amount of metadata that would require probably more that a month of running my CPU at 100% to recreate, so formatting and reinstalling windows is just not an option. Please forgive my ignorance, but what do you mean by reinstalling the bootloader? I don't really want to just move them over and hope it works, unless I know it most likely will.

After having a boot SSD die on me awhile ago, I replaced it with 2x SSDs so they could be set up in RAID 1. After some research, it seemed to me the easiest way to do it in Windows was to set up GPT mirrors. I followed this guide. It's worked great but now I need to move my system to a new motherboard and I cannot find any guide for this with Google. There's a lot of tutorials that explain how to set it up but nothing about moving it, especially when the mirrors are also your boot drives. I'm hoping someone here has done this before and knows if there's a special way to go about it or at least what precautions I should take. I'll buy a new Windows license if I have to, I don't care about that. My main concern is data integrity and just having it boot up as my original system. Or at least as close to that as is possible. I'd really appreciate any help or insight you guys can offer.