portability of installed drives

[Odyssey]

If a hard drive is partitioned, formatted, and has Linux, say Ubuntu, installed on computer A, the drive is then unplugged and moved to computer B as the only drive on B, will Linux boot or is the install hardware-specific to A?

If not, does it require a new install (i.e., as if it had never been installed while on A) or can it be "tweaked" to boot on B?

[pavlo_7]

If a hard drive is partitioned, formatted, and has Linux, say Ubuntu, installed on computer A, the drive is then unplugged and moved to computer B as the only drive on B, will Linux boot or is the install hardware-specific to A?

If not, does it require a new install (i.e., as if it had never been installed while on A) or can it be "tweaked" to boot on B?

Normally it can be tweaked. It should detect new hardware and ask you if you want to configure new devices and remove old.

[devils casper]

it will recognize most of the hardware. but if you have different Monitor, X server will create problems. you can configure that easily.







Casper

[Roxoff]

I changed the motherboard and cpu on one of my PC's during xmas week, went from a PIII550 to a PIII1000 on a dual-processor board. Fedora Core 6 didn't even bat an eyelid, it just worked. I was mightily impressed, btw, although I'd got the same video card and CD drive attached.

[Odyssey]

Would you choose, everything else being equal, to just do the install on Computer B in the first place?

Or would your comfort level be high enough to install on A and move it to B (my assumption here is that if there are any problems, they are likely to be so minor as to be inconsequential?

My reason for asking is that Computer B is in frequent use by various people, so it is more convenient to use A for the install, create the mount points for /home, etc and then move it to B.

[saikee]

devils_casper reminder of the X-Windows may not work should be taken seriously because installed Linux doesn't changed the xorg setting and so the user must do it manually, by editing configuration setting in the text file /etc/X11/xorg.conf or run the configurator program "xorgconfig" at console.

The GUI configurator will be lost if the video mismatches but the terminal mode should be there if you press ctrl+alt+backspace.

[pavlo_7]

I was mightily impressed

yeah, I was also impressed when I took HD (with FreeBSD on it) from my laptop and put it in my desktop. The poor thing didn't even notice that it was started on different hardware. It just worked!

[Roxoff]

The poor thing didn't even notice that it was started on different hardware. It just worked!

lol, yeah. You can bet it noticed, alright. It just knew that you were smart enough to know what you were doing, and it could handle it easy, so no point making a fuss.

I've done this with other operating systems (admittedly older ones made around '98 or even 2000 ) and ended up with it whining about missing drivers for this and that, and having to reboot a million squillion times, and even then not work properly.

[Odyssey]

I replaced the old drive with the new one (using the "master" cable connector), but it wouldn't boot, so I just installed 6.10 again. Perhaps unfortunately I did so without plugging the old drive in again (on the slave connector), so now when I want to choose which drive I want to boot from, the computer just automatically boots from the "master" cable (both drives set to cable select and both drives are on the same cable).

I would like grub to give me a choice between the two. What do I need to do to make it see both at boot?

[devils casper]

system will boot up from harddisk on the master connector only. swap harddisks.





Casper