Arch Linux

Dj_kourampies

Member

From: Greece

Registered: 2005-11-02

Posts: 32

Website

Moving hard disks/OS to a new machine

I ve been running my Arch home server succesfully for years on a very old motherboard with a Socket A Sempron 2800+ CPU, thats like a frankenstein of computing. Due to its dead ethernet and SATA ports I plugged an ethernet card, some SATA cards etc.

It works perfectly, but its not an elegant solution.

I got an unused full ATX Intel  motherboard (not a server one) with a Pentium 4 2.8 cpu for free. The motherboard was probably really expensive at the time,it was sitting as a spare for years on a company a friend of mine works. Since it has SATA and Gigabit ethernet, and can use the same DDR1 memory Im using now, I was thinking of using it for my home server. Since my fstab has all the disks configured with UUID, I suppose I just have to plug the disks to the new system, and boot?

Is there anything else I should watch for?

ewaller

Administrator

From: Pasadena, CA

Registered: 2009-07-13

Posts: 20,698

Re: Moving hard disks/OS to a new machine

Is there anything else I should watch for?

The order in which drives are enumerated.
If the UUIDs get hosed, you can temporarily change to drive/partition notation.
What about the video card?  You will need the correct driver for X.

Have fun

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graysky

Wiki Maintainer

From: :wq

Registered: 2008-12-01

Posts: 10,734

Website

Re: Moving hard disks/OS to a new machine

In addition to the video diffs, read and follow this article to setup and rebuild the kernel image: https://wiki.archlinux.org/index.php/In … ting_Linux
UUIDs should be fine, but you can change them to labels if you wish (my personal preference).

$ cat /etc/fstab
tmpfs	/tmp	tmpfs	nodev,nosuid	0	0
tmpfs /scratch tmpfs nodev,size=14G 0 0

LABEL=boot	/boot	ext4	defaults,discard,noatime	0	1
LABEL=arch64	/ ext4	defaults,discard,noatime	0	1
LABEL=homes	/home	ext4	defaults,discard,noatime	0	1
LABEL=var	/var	ext4	defaults,noatime	0	1
LABEL=data	/mnt/data	ext4	defaults,relatime	0	1

tmpfs	/home/facade/.cache	tmpfs	noatime,nodev,nosuid,size=1G	0	0

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AUR packages • Zsh and other configs

Dj_kourampies

Member

From: Greece

Registered: 2005-11-02

Posts: 32

Website

Re: Moving hard disks/OS to a new machine

There is no need for a video card driver. Since its a server only machine, I dont have X installed. I have a super old PCI card just for displaying bootup and error messages. I will do the chroot thing and move it then, this motherboard seems like a good upgrade. Thanks!

brain0

Developer

From: Aachen - Germany

Registered: 2005-01-03

Posts: 1,382

Re: Moving hard disks/OS to a new machine

Just boot the fallback initramfs the first time, regenerate initramfs, and you should be fine.

Dj_kourampies

Member

From: Greece

Registered: 2005-11-02

Posts: 32

Website

Re: Moving hard disks/OS to a new machine

Just boot the fallback initramfs the first time, regenerate initramfs, and you should be fine.

This worked perfectly. Thanks!