Migrating old installation to new machine, can't reach server

StartOS Support
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Been running a StartOS node for a year with great success. I’m really happy with my choice of StartOS and would like to express my gratitude to everyone involved!

My setup was a Lenovo X270 laptop with an M2 boot drive for operating system and services and a 2,5" SSD for blockchain storage.

I’m in the process of crossgrading to a Lenovo ThinkCentre M710q tiny. I’ve intended to make this easy for myself and just pull all drives from the old machine and stick them in the new one.

Since the ThinkCentre will run headless I had to trust the root CA for the Thinkpad server first. This miraculously worked after a few attempts (on CachyOS over local LAN). I never did it previously because, well… I didn’t have to since I could just connect Sparrow and mobile wallets through means of QR codes displayed on the laptop’s screen.

Now I’ve simply stuck the drives in the ThinkCentre and… can’t reach the server using the bookmarks I’ve created when running the X270.

Frankly, I can’t even tell if the ThinkCentre booted properly because I’ve got no display for it…

Do you guys have any tips on how to proceed in this case?

I could just flash a new OS on the M2 drive, of course. But I suspect there’s something else I overlook here.

What I really don’t need to do again is downloading and verifying the blockchain. If I do a reinstall of the OS, will I be able to tell it there’s a blockchain already present on another disk? I think we’ve talked about that and it didn’t work…

The M710p has two M2 slots. If I flash a new one with StartOS, will I be able to “Restore from backup” from the old install (which is technically not a backup…) and then trick the restored OS to accept the old blockchain? Something tells me that won’t work as well…

Thanks in advance for your support!

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The inability to boot the new server from the drive that came from the old server is probably related to BIOS options. Specifically Secure Boot, or UEFI vs legacy. Out of the box, desktop/laptop machines do not have the ideal BIOS options set for a headless server. Most will stop on an error about missing keyboard. You know… the old joke about “keyboard missing press F1 to continue.” I would take a look at the UEFI, and secure boot settings on the old server, and then set the options in the new one to match. You’ll probably get it to boot from that same drive. Of course, you’ll need a screen and at least a keyboard connected, to do so. I would also disable the missing keyboard stop, and enable “on” after power loss.

If you have to do a fresh install on the new server, on a new drive, you can transfer your server intact as one of the recovery options. You’ll need a way to connect the old drive to the new server, in addition to the destination drive. Restore from backup is only for emergency recovery where something bad happened, such as drive failure, and the backup is the only source of your data. It’s not the right option for a transfer because of certain complications, such as lightning channel closures.

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Thank you very much for your reply. I’ll source keyboard and display, look at the bios settings and report back!