Post
Topic
Board Hardware
Re: Official FutureBit Apollo II/BTC Software/Image and Support thread
by
MegatronOHMICAVT
on 13/11/2024, 15:51:05 UTC
You need to format the new 2TB drive with the format command in settings. Don't format your old data drive.  Just to make sure all is good.   I did that with my new drive.  Then if you have a usb to pcie adapter, copy your 1TB drive to your new 2TB drive.  takes about 45 mins.  then shutdown, swap and reboot and it should work fine.  THat's my experience.  Keep the 1TB as a backup.  That's what I have.

I did the reindex-chainstate , took longer.  I found it to slow down the process on the raspberry pi. The raspberry cpu isn't fast enough for reindex-chainstate.  Also lack of ram slows the process.    Seems to actually be quicker to start an IBD after a formatted drive and it is quicker.  However, I highly recommend a backup like above.  Once my IBD was complete I copied the drive for a backup.  I also would backup the nvme drive mid IBD download when I was having problems with the raspberry pi crashing mid download.  That made recovery quicker in future crashes.  My hardest part was the IBD.  Once done my system is now running much better.  

I have low trust in the reliability of the included microsd card.  The original is possibly a much older 16GB microsd.   I purchased a new one cheap and with much higher bandwidth and more memory, Cheapest one I could find.  I flashed it and find it more stable than the included card was.



A follow up question about doing IBD and overcoming what seems to be too much stress for the RAM & processor.

I've got a backup NVME with about the first-half of the IBD on it. I would like to see if there's advice on the procedures for starting a node (Apollo BTC installing 2.0.5) by using the backed-up blockchain data.

Its a 2TB NVME drive in the node, with a 1TB NVME connected via USB and a flashed micro SD to install the system.

Questions are things like which folders need to go over and in what order should steps be taken from initial boot. Thank you!