Major Upgrade (What to do?)

[Crackmunch]

If i was thinking about windows i would just reinstall windows when i upgraded my mother board and procesor. But since im running mandrake 8 do i have to reinstall? Do i have to recompile the kernel? What all is involved. Thanks

[Craig McPherson]

No, Linux doesn't need to be installed when the low-level hardware changes. Linux probes the low-level hardware at boot, and doesn't store it in any sort of configuration file, so it won't even know that it's "woken up" on new hardware.

If you're going to be changing high-level hardware that requires drivers, like network cards and sound cards, you should disable the old ones before installing the new ones.

You will not need to recompile the kernel, unless your current kernel is configured very oddly. Once you get the new system up, you should recompile the kernel anyway to get best performance out of the new system.

[Craig McPherson]

In fact, you might not even have to reinstall Windows. I've done worse upgrades than that without reinstalling Windows.

Uninstall any software for any devices that you won't be keeping, but don't worry too much about disabling drivers. Disable any startup programs just to make things simpler, set the video mode to 640 X 480 256 just to be safe, then do the upgrade. When Windows comes up, it'll probably spend ten minutes discarding old drivers and installing new ones, but it'll get the job done.

[xhadow]

you don't need to reinstall
just recompile the kernel if you want, to get better performance, for example you change the CPU from Intel Pentium to AMD Athlon, then you can recompile the kernel to use AMD CPU
That options is only in kernel 2.4 though

[ 29 June 2001: Message edited by: xhadow ]