Use old disk in NAS without booting from it

[AndreasLP]

Hi,

I did some reprovisioning of my DS1618+. It used to have two HDDs in one Raid volume (for storing files), and one SSD as a single drive (for running VMs). I then removed all drives and started fresh with 4 SSDs in Raid (for fast storage).

My intention was then to plug in the SSD drive (as a 5th single drive outside of the new Raid volume), import the old volume and just start running the VMs again. So I did a hot plugin and the import and everything worked fine. All VMs up and running without a hassle. Until I rebooted the NAS. Then it wont boot until I remove the old SSD drive. After boot I can once again "hot add" it and get it online again. I guess this is because there is a copy of the old installation on the NAS and that somehow gets selected as first boot option and it then does not work.

So my question is how to make the old drive "not bootable"? How do I tell my NAS not to try to boot (and fail) from that drive? Is there a boot order setting somewhere or can I remove some files or boot sectors from the old SSD? I'm quite used to handling the terminal so it doesn't have to be something that is done in the Web GUI.

 

[Telos]

The OS is on every drive. The NAS boots from all. There is no boot drive per se.

You should have reformatted the old drive prior to reinstalling. Shutdown, pull and reformat that drive, reinsert, and restart... the NAS will rebuild that drive into the "degraded" array.

 

[AndreasLP]

The whole idea was to avoid reformatting to save all the VMs and save me some time (exporting and importing is painfully slow in Virtual Machine Manager). Since everything works when the drive is not attached at the beginning it seems like something should be able to be done to keep the NAS from trying to boot from the drive. The drive in question is not part of the array. Its a different storage pool with only one drive so it does not affect the other array in some way. It was the same in the old setup. The drive was not part of the original storage raid on the NAS, it was added later as a single drive.

 

[Telos]

Its a different storage pool with only one drive so it does not affect the other array in some way

Thanks for clarification. Can you change the location of the shared folder that stores the VM to the other volume? Then add that drive afresh?

I'm wondering if there is a conflict of packages that were installed previously on this single drive, that might be present on the multi-drive volume.