Motherboard upgrade, re-install??

[just4spam]

Hey everyone,

I am current running an A7V333 (check sig) board I am looking to upgrade to a A7N8X board (From Asus, same manf as my old board) and I was wondering if this would require a reinstall.

But gut feeling tells me yes, because of hard coded hardware addresses in linux.

It would be really cool if a reinstall could be avoided.

Currently running Mandrake 9.1 custom built kernel (check sig)

Any thoughts?

[hard candy]

It seems to me if the chipset changes, the IRQ's will change.

[dalek]

If your home directory is seperate, you should be able to reinstall and just use your old home directory. At least you will save some of your old settings and files saved there. Hint, hit F1 and type in 'expert' so you can have more options. After you set up your partitions just tell it not to format your /home directory.

Really, I would turn that puppy on and see what it does. You may want to really give your log files a once over if it does boot. May have to correct a few issues. Well, maybe more than a few but you get the idea. he he he

Post back what happens. I have done this with windoze. Sometimes it works. Takes a while to boot but it eventually gets there.


:D :D :D

[just4spam]

What about this. This may get me no where.

What I used say, Norton Ghost and took an image of my HDD, then repalced my Mobo and restore my drive?? I don't believe this but I think I read this a while back.

I am more interested in keeping my kernel. It's a custom built with the all wireless and joystick, usb camera stuff I added which took some time to find and impliment. Is there a way of using my existing kernel on my new board?

I had the edit some of the usb storage.h (header) files to get support for various devices, which were a pain.

I can keep the .config kernel file but still would be a pain.

[Icarus]

You really should not have many problems changing motherboards...the changes should be detected during your boot.

The real problem is getting the drives on the same IDE/SCSI channels. When installing the new MB make sure you put the cables to the drives back the same way, in most cases if / was at hda2 and now it's hdb2 it will fail to boot
(a good 'ol "kernel panic")

This of course can be changed by modifying the grub/lilo bootloader to know where to find the kernel and also the /etc/fstab so it can mount everyting properly.

In other words, have a boot disk handy :D

[JamminJoeyB]

The most importat thing here is your .config file for your kernel.

If you have to reinstall you could always recompile the kernel using your custom .config file and just about be back to where you are at today.

If you don't want to re-download the source back that up also.

I'd also back up those header files you had to modify to get things going. Sounds like you did a lot of work getting this system tweaked to the bleeding edge. I wouldn't want to lose that if it were me.

[ph34r]

I've successfully moved a very customized Slack 8.1 install between 4 *completely* different systems - only thing they had in common was the i386 instruction set and a 3com nic. All I had to do was recompile my kernel the first time to change from i686/smp to i586 (pentium 1).

[dalek]

Hook up all the cables, hard drives and CD drives, that way it knows where to find them and turn the puppy on. If it crashes and don't work at least you tried. If it does work, I think it will myself, then check your log files for errors and get those corrected. If you changed everything and the mobo was a different chipset, different brand and just plane nothing in common then you may have a problem. Sounds like really minor though to me. The hard drive is the biggest thing here. Make sure the master/slave and channel is just like it was.

It will find a lot of hardware changes when it boots and will likely take a while to sort trough it all but I'll bet it works. I would boot then shutdown and reboot and see if it finds anything it missed the first time. I would not reset the machine even if it appears to be hung unless it had been there for a long time. Especially during the module dependancy part.

What have you got to loose? I have taken a hard drive out of a AOPEN system and put in a Amptron system and it still boot. Takes a while, makes a lot of changes to the hardware settings but it worked.

My two cents worth. Take it with a grain of salt.

:D :D :D :D