Hi all,
Long time, no post. I’ve been using an old Dell server machine as my Plex server for the last five years and it’s worked very well. It was a Windows 10 Pro machine, but on Wednesday, there was a BCD error on the boot drive and, to put things in technical terms, it’s buggered. I thought to myself, “no worries. I’ll just reformat and install Linux. I’ve been meaning to for ages”, but then I realised that the hard drives are formatted using Windows’ own ResFS (Windows Storage Spaces) for which there’s no Linux driver. The hard drive stack is still fine. I hooked it up to my main machine and I can read all the files, but I can’t get Plex to see them. I installed the Media Server software on Knife (my main machine), but it won’t recognise any metadata that Plex has added to the files and there’s no way I can edit the settings to do it - either in the main settings interface, or the three dot menu by the side of the categories (I just get reorder or unpin). Ultimately, I want to convert the Windows Storage Space into a standard RAID so that I can reformat the Dell with TrueNAS or similar, but until then, can anyone give me an idea of how to make Plex recognise the drives as an existing Plex libraryon Knife (preferably without losing all the watch data for things to resume, watched status and so on)? I have been a Plex Pass user since 2014.
I thought as much. Oh, well (expletives were deleted). So, if I want to set up the library again on Knife, I can, but it will just be the same as starting again from scratch? And there’s actually not much point doing that if I’m just going to start again on the Dell-reborn-as-NAS?
You could use Knife as a temporary Plex Server, until you get the Dell reborn. Don’t put a lot of effort into Knife - no playlists, customizing posters, remote access, etc - since you know it will go away soon. You could turn off thumbnail generation, etc. as well. Sync Watch State will keep your watched/not watched status updated.
You can then rebuild the Dell however you want. Once PMS is running and configured on it, you can decommission Knife and not worry about having to move any database files, etc.
It stores all metadata which it collects in the Plex data folder.
Which is not easily transferred to a different operating system platform.
Transferring from Windows to Windows should be doable, as long as you managed to retain all the drive letters your media drives had on the old machine over to the new machine.
In other words, each media file must be accessible under the exact same drive letter, folder path and file name as it was on the old machine.
Well, I got a new hard drive from Amazon and I’m halfway through a five-hour copy to put everything from the WindowsSpace onto the drive (before copying it off onto a real RAID).
I’m trying to install TrueNAS onto the Dell server to make use of the machine even though it’s already died once and it’s bloody hot while I’m trying to do it
