Is it possible for me to move the hard drive my server is on to another computer? When I first opened the server I didn’t plan accordingly, and chose to run off a computer with only two ram slots, and now want to move over to a machine with six slots. Can I just move the hard drive over, or would it not run properly if I did? Also, if I can move the hard drive over, what sort of steps might I need to take afterwards? I’m not great with computers, so I would love some help with this! Thanks
TLDR:/ answer: Yes, but it may take some work.
Longer answer:
MineOS do not handle hardware. MineOS is a WebUI running on top of a *nix style OS. If you use the preconfigured ISO’s your OS is Turnkey, wich itself is a stripped down and streamlined Debian clone.
Taking a hard drive containing a working OS from one set of hardware to another may work straight away. Several users in here will tell you that it will go smoothly and that they have done so themselves. It may also severely crash your system and give you headaches and problems you did not know could exist. The reason is your motherboard. It is based of a chipset using a spesific set of drivers for everything like your RAM, your CPU, your base chipset, your hard drive controllers and so on. Then you add in a set of drivers for your network card, and the drivers for your graphis card. The combination of this gives each motherboard and hardware combination a very spesific footprint. Two motherboards may have wildly different footprints.
Your OS handles this by having sets of drivers installed. These sets gives the OS’s certain flexibility to jiggle the outlines of the motherboard footprints, but only to a certain degree. When it comes to base drivers these are often compiled into the OS core, since they have a profound effect on the base workings of your computer.
If two motherboards are alike enough, moving an OS drive from one board to another may work just fine. But I cannot guarantee it.
Don’ t try something like that without a really good backup first. I reccomend using the “archive” function in MineOS, and then copy out the archive files for your minecraft servers to another location (like another PC). If the swap fails, you can reinstall so that your OS core recompiles and supports your new hardware, then import your archives to reinstate your minecraft servers like they where before the swap, but on new hardware.
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Okay, thank you so much for this! I’ll keep in mind to save a backup before swapping, just in case it doesn’t go smoothly.
Typically, if simply swapping the drive to a new system doesn’t “just work” it’s good to have exported archives of the server (create a server archive and download/export it from the server to elsewhere), reinstall MineOS on the new system for the new hardware configuration to be accounted for, reupload those server archives you created and exported earlier, then select import server from archive in the WebUI and boom you’re done.
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