unmesh

Today I tried to do this though a little differently than using a brand new USB bootloader. My ESXi XPE VMs use the synoboot.img file and a .vmdk "wrapper" rather than generating a .vmdk file, both in the datastore. I shut down the VM, used the Datastore Browser to copy the current version of the synoboot.img from the ESXi server to my Windows laptop and flashed it to a USB drive. I then put both the USB drive and the Hard drive from the ESXi server into the N40L and booted the machine. Since this was just a test, I did not bother re-editing grub.cfg to change the USB VID:PID or th

@masters Thanks for the info. Though I would "shuck" the USB drive and connect to it using SATA whereas the WD article talks about connections over USB

I will find some time to give this a try before I end up needing it for real. Is this kind of migration also possible from one bootloader to another? Thanks

I have a couple of DSM instances running as ESXi VMs with RDMed SATA hard drives and have recently begun thinking about a recovery strategy should I lose my sole ESXi server but not my hard drives. (I do have backups too in the form of baremetal but those are kept offline). Is there a way to create USB drives from the synoboot vmdk files, edit grub.cfg with the new VID:PID and MAC address and boot a new supported system off this USB with the hard drives moved to this new system? Or is it sufficient to create a new USB stick with the same version of bootloader, edit grub

Joining this party a bit late but I was successful in getting Moments with Face Recognition in a temporary installation in a Haswell based machine. I'm excited to consider this as an alternative to Google Photos. My production machines are either VMs on ESXi on Haswell or baremetal AMD machines as per my signature. Any hope of running on any of these? If the hardware is capable, is there even a non-destructive way to go from a 3615xs installation to a 918+ one? Thanks

Finally ready to do something and the H2+ is out of stock, not even an ETA

I'm exploring various ideas for a NAS with a low physical and power footprint that could be placed remotely and one thought is to use a small 1L desktop with a 2.5" HDD. The largest one is 5TB but SMR and I'm hoping someone can share their experience with using SMR drives for backups of PCs or MacBooks which should present a sequential write workload. Are only random write problematic for SMR HDDs? Also, some of these drives are reported to support TRIM. I had only heard of TRIM in the context of SSDs which DSM only supports as caches, so would DSM support TRIM on a HDD and would t

@IG-88, When I have some time to spare, I am going to try the method from this thread on a fresh test installation. Never know when I will do an update I shouldn't have attempted Thanks

What has worked for me in the past is to disconnect the old drives, add a new (in my case small size) drive and flash a new bootloader USB. I then install the last known DSM version onto the new drive using the same login and password. Then I add back the original drives and DSM offers to correct the version on them (it might be the migrate option but I don't remember). I let it do that, power down, remove the new drive, let it reboot with only the original drives and all was fine. I keep good records of what is running and save the bootloader images with their modified grub.cfg an

When I try creating VMs with arkilee's .vma file, I get the following messages during the restore though DSM does come up WARNING: You have not turned on protection against thin pools running out of space. WARNING: Set activation/thin_pool_autoextend_threshold below 100 to trigger automatic extension of thin pools before they get full. What if anything do I need to do to fix this? Also, a display isn't configured but a serial port is. Using "qm terminal <vmid>" after starting the VM takes me some time. How do I open a terminal to look at the serial output

Large file transfers between the VM on the Lenovo TS140 and the HP N54L have historically been limited to approximately 95MB/s by the Gigabit Ethernet link. I got 10Gigabit NICs for both and have recently got around to testing performance. For the network, iperf3 shows about 9Gbps transfer between the two. The ESXi server happens to have a NVMe drive in addition to hard drives so I used the former for one end of the storage transfer. The HP only has hard drives though it is a modern one and dd writes from /dev/zero occur at 250MB/s and dd reads to /dev/null occur at 150MB/s after f

OP asked about putting the synoboot image in a datastore on a USB drive. I wanted to create USB drives with the latest version of 6.5, 6.7 and 7.0 to test which ones would boot on a variety of PCs and learned that one could create a datastore on the ESXi boot drive itself! The following link was instrumental. https://www.horizonbits.com/2017/02/19/squeezing-esxi-on-usb/ I haven't tried it as a datastore for deployment though.

@bearcat, I could only boot with the USB stick with the wrong VID/PID and wanted to edit grub.cfg while running DSM. When I SSH'ed in, I noticed that there wasn't a /dev/synoboot1 available to mount. Having used FixSynoBoot.sh on ESXi, I remembered reading that it had helped with some baremetal installs so I tried it and it did! I will try and find some time to do a clean install

It's the same USB stick, so by elimination, it's the image but I don't know how to test the image other than booting from it.

I've had a N54L running for several years and thought getting a N40L running would be piece of cake. Something changed to make it difficult and I'm hoping to figure out what out of curiosity now more than anything else.