[plug] Swapping disks to another laptop

[Steve Vertigan]

psteege at tpg.com.au wrote:
 
> I have a 6Gb removable Fujitsu disk drive in my Gateway laptop, but
> the laptop just died.  I am running RedHat 7.1.
> I want to purchase another laptop but not lose all the data on the
> current disk drive.
> When I purchase the new laptop, that is compatible with this disk
> drive, how can I bring the system back online?
> Will the existing kernel, on the disk, reject the hardware because it
> does not match what existed on the original Gateway?
> Can I just do another RedHat install and select update, instead of
> new install ??

I don't know that it would work in all cases but I've switched hard
drives between machines and had no problems, it's *much* better than
windows in this aspect.  So the first thing to do would probably be just
to try it and see if it works.  If that fails then as long as you have
your /home (or whichever directory holds your personal work) mounted on
a different partition to the actual system reinstalling without losing
this data shouldn't be a problem as long as you know what you're doing.

But the safest option (wrt installing) if you have a floppy drive would
be to install the new HD in your laptop and boot with a rescue disk like
Tom's rescue disk (http://www.toms.net/rb/) and get all your data onto
another machine or storage medium.  Then after you've re-installed you
can copy it all back so there's no drama if anything gets wiped while
re-installing.

Regards,
Steve 
-- 
OpenBSD maelstrom.dyn.dhs.org KLINK#1 i386
 4:20AM  up 6 days, 17 mins, 1 user, load averages: 0.08, 0.12, 0.09
It's easier to fight for one's principles than to live up to them.