[plug] Changing hardware on desktop

Craig Ringer craig at postnewspapers.com.au
Wed Jul 31 22:35:26 WST 2002


Cameron Patrick wrote:

>On Wed, 31 Jul 2002 20:53:44 +0800, Jon Miller wrote:
>
>| Like to know if Linux is like the other OS's in that there is a
>| procedure when changing hardware.  Currently I have a Linux Red Hat
>| 7.2 installed onaa desktop.  The hardware is a ASUS motherboard, AMD
>| 750MHz, 512MB memory, DVD, CD-ROM, 3Ccom NIC, Soundblaster, WD30GB HDD
>| and a nVidia 64MB Video Card.  I m planning to change the to a EPoX
>| Motherboard (8K3A+) with DDR memory(currently DDR266), WD60 or 100GB
>| HDD and the other device I'm changing is the video card to a GeForce4
>| MX440.  In the matter of the motherboard in most OS changing this item
>| usually involved either a complete install from scratch or hardware
>| change program.  Is Linux the same when it comes to changing certain
>| hardware.
>
>It should Just Work without any fiddling.
>
Well... not always if you're doing a HDD upgrade. If you plan to keep 
your linux system on the old disk and just use the new one for storage 
you're fine, but transferring a linux install from one disk to another - 
while not problematic - can get complicated depending on what exactly 
you want to do. Simply dd'ing the entire disk device across should be 
fine (so long as you do so booted off a disk or in read-only mode), and 
dd'ing across the partitons (then growing the filesystems) to a newly 
formatted disk should be cool too but you'll need to install a new boot 
sector. If you want to upgrade the disk some other way... well depends 
on the method, sometimes its easy and sometimes a real PITA.

I've never had any issues with disk upgrades, and this hybrid Debian 
woody/sid system I'm running has been moved from a P100 on 2 500mb SCSI 
disks to an AMD Duron 650 with a 15gig western digital, then got moved 
to a 3ogig western digital, then just this month a 1.5gig AMD Athlon XP 
1800+ with an 80G seagate barracuda, all without issues. I just fdisk'ed 
the new disk, dd'd across the partitions, booted a CD and ran LILO after 
setting the new disk to primary master, and where needed corrected 
/etc/fstab then I was off. You could always dd across the entire disk, 
but I usually need to upsize /usr/local and /usr as well as /home. (and 
I do need them on separate partitions).

>So long as you either leave the machine with two hard discs, or copy everything over from one drive to the other, and the partitions have the same numbers, then the hard drive upgrade should be okay.
>
If you leave the machine with two disks, make sure the old one is on the 
same controller position (ie hda probably - primary master) that it was 
before or you'll confuse the boot loader and the BIOS.

If you copy everything across it will be ok but beware of doing this 
using the "cp" command as it will break symlinks, hang on named pipes, 
and all sorts of things like that. Using cp -aR will let it copy device 
files etc ok, but you'll still have to watch stuff like recursion. You 
can't "cp -aR / /mnt/newroot" obviously.

I've probably made it sound more complex than it needs to be. The quick 
answer is: keep your old disk on the same controller position (eg 
primary master) and all will be well.

>  
>



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