Arch Linux

Calmatory

Member

Registered: 2008-05-25

Posts: 15

New hardware to an existing installation?

Well, I just ordered some parts for my server machine. The current hardware from late 90's, Slot 1 Celeron, PCI VGA, PCI NIC, PCI sound card(left from desktop days) and 512MB of RAM with random ECS motherboard.

However, the new hardware will be Dual core Athlon 64 with 780G chipset, few gigs of RAM and onboard graphics controller, NIC and soundcard. What kind of issues could arise when upgrading hardware like this?  Skipping no more than ten years in few dozen minutes.

People keep telling me that "It is Linux man, it has no problems which the noob Windoze has!1 Just plug everything in and ur veri ok!!" Somehow I doubt this. I haven't tried upgrading any hardware to existing installation on any distros, and they might do well when going from new motherboard to another, slightly different motherboard. But in my case I am literally skipping ten years ahead, to completely different setup. I remind that the old hardware was not ACPI compatible and the new one will be. Could this cause problems?

The alternate way to ask the question is; "Can I use same HDD in different machines without problem?" - I find this question very relative to my upcoming issue as in that all other hardware is being replaced, except the HDD. I am even adding a new HDD for more storage.

If problems are going to arise, how can I move my stuff to the new installation without problems? E.g. backup user accounts, settings, installed programs etc? I assume that copying /home/ from installation to another shouldn't cause problems. Which is the best way to do this? Do I just plug the new HDD into the old hardware and do the magic with cp?

Surgat_

Member

Registered: 2007-08-08

Posts: 317

Re: New hardware to an existing installation?

As it's a server, I'd just do a fresh install of Arch x86_64 to get the advantages of a 64 bits OS. As of backing up, you'll probably want to save a copy of pacman -Q to see all the packages installed (or maybe pacman -Qqe, explicitally installed packages without version number), /etc to save systemwide settings and maybe /home, but I think you have to create the users with the same name and uid to be able to use your old /home.

Calmatory

Member

Registered: 2008-05-25

Posts: 15

Re: New hardware to an existing installation?

I can not really run 64-bit version, as the server has software which is not 64-bit compatible and I am not too eager to start doing IL32 library trickery or unpacking the executable.

So I guess my best bet would be to backup the data and use the old data as much as possible and reinstall the rest.

Thanks.

bangkok_manouel

Member

From: indicates a starting point

Registered: 2005-02-07

Posts: 1,556

Re: New hardware to an existing installation?

if you didnt modify your mkinitcpio.conf, it is very likely that at least the fallback kernel will boot perfectly...