[plug] reinstall for new core hardware?

[Ben New]

Hi all,

I have a machine running all the usual server-side suspects (web, mail, 
dns, etc).  If I was to take the hard drives from that box (machine A) 
and put them into another (machine B), including the OS partitions 
(containing /, /usr, /etc...), would machine B boot?  Mandrake 9.1 is 
the OS, with quite a few updates, and of course many customisations, 
applied.  I'm planning to move the machine to Debian soon, but not until 
I've explored it with machine A first.

Machine A is a celeron 533 and machine B is a dual P3 500 with an Intel 
N440BX board (upgraded firmware for the P3's).  A slight improvement ;-)

They both have onboard graphics, but I'd have to assume different 
drivers are required.  Machine B has onboard LAN while machine A has a 
generic PCI NIC, so different drivers there also.  That's not counting 
the rest of the onboard resources - controllers, etc.

Obviously there will need to be a kernel compile in there somewhere (in 
my case, probably about 5 or 6 before I get it right) with the increased 
number of processors and probably other things (?)

What I'm mostly interested in is the boot process, the first time in the 
new box.  Will the OS cope with the changes to the entire set of system 
resources?  How automated will the process of detecting and installing 
the correct drivers be?  Will it be easier to just save the contents of 
/etc and a few other locations, wipe the rest of the OS and reinstall, 
then copy back /etc (etc)?

I'm not even sure if this is a general Linux question, or more 
specifically a Mandrake question (probably both actually) so any advice 
or info would be appreciated.

Regards,
Ben


-- 
Ben New
ben at leftclick.com.au

Leftclick Software Development
http://www.leftclick.com.au/