I thought I’d take a quick break right now to do what should’ve been a simple maintenance on my new media server. My latest hard drive added was still setup as an external USB drive, so now that I’ve got the cables that I needed I figured that I’d simply power everything down, move the drive into the case, and that’d be that!
Oops.
When I booted back up, instead of the OS seeing a 4 TB disk that’s about half full, somehow it managed to see a 500 GB partition that it thought was my old drive and a 3.5 TB partition that was completely foreign to it. 😛
A quick Googling suggested that the USB adapter that I have probably has something in the controller that serves as a boot manager, so whereas I thought I was being all smart and formatted it to ext4 a week ago in preparation for today’s task, in effect using the USB adapter to do so kind of hosed up that little plan something fierce!
So here we are now…
(USB adapter plugged in while hard drive is still mounted inside case!)
Thankfully I’ve still got just barely enough free space between my other three drives to split up all of the data that’s on the “external” one, so now I get to wait another umpteen hours to copy everything over to those drives, only to as soon as it’s done swap out the cables one more time, reformat, and copy everything back again!!!
😐