Hello there
Okay, I need some serious and fast help here + Hardware experience.

I need to move my HDD which contains now Linux installed on it to another PC.

Is my linux going to be corrupted when it tries to start on the other PC, or it gonna identify the new hardware it finds on this new pc? Is it gonna crash or something?

And if it crashes, if i return it back to my first PC, will it run again with no problems, or the failure will be permenant???

Please advise...

...

In my limited experience (i.e. I've done this once), it hosed things up, but not beyond repair. I had to reconfigure x, but hotplug and the hardware autodetection seemed to take care of most everything else as I recall.

Of course, it might be somewhat distro specific, and you should be careful not to change architectures or you might run into problems.

anyway, that's my

If you're really worried about it, I would try to make an exact image of your HDD onto another drive. That way if something bad does happen, you can recover...

Also search these forums, I'm sure someone else has tried this.

Another thought I had is that you might have to recreate either lilo or grub's device map to make sure everything is identified properly for the bootloader. But you should be able to fix this with any live CD...

I have done this before and it worked without any problems. Its even easier if you are moving the drive to a machine with similar specs.

You might find issues if its another motherboard because of memory mapping with the boards to be different in the OS. Also little things like video drivers and your network might not work right away until you configure it for the new mac. could you use a livecd for you new machine?

J

Quote:

Originally Posted by hockeyman_102 You might find issues if its another motherboard because of memory mapping with the boards to be different in the OS. Also little things like video drivers and your network might not work right away until you configure it for the new mac. could you use a livecd for you new machine? J

Unfortunately, my pc's MB is MSI, while the other pc is GigaByte, i guess
Also the mac problem might be faced

What is liveCd?

Also, if my system fails to start, can i use the rescue cd ?
I forgot to tell you i'm using fedora core 4

Many things can go wrong, but because you are using FC, chances of this are really slim because Fedora Core has a good hardware detection tool called Kudzu which runs at boot time (if you haven't disabled it). When I moved my hard drive to another system (I had FC3 installed on the drive), the motherboard and network cards were not exactly the same but everything worked fine. Kudzu prompted me to accept the hardware changes and my network card worked without any reconfiguration (using dhcp).

Moving a hard drive from one machine to another ususally is totally straightforward, as long as the same drive position is maintained, meaning that (for example) if the drive in the original machine was the primary master, it needs to be the primary master in the target machine as well.

Otherwise though, the only other gotchas might be that the kernel modules that are needed on the target machine are different than those on the source machine. If so, you may need to manually load them (using the modprobe command). I'd suggest just giving it a try and seeing how it goes. Worst case is that it doesn't boot up, and you can just return the drive to the original machine. Good luck with it and welcome to LQ

Here's some backup utilities. Haven't used any of them. Typically I only keep the files I want backed up (not afraid of losing all my configurations) so it's not a lot of space and I just use K3b to copy the files I want to CD. Also there's things like Norton Ghost, and linux equivalents, Partition Image, g4u, and Mondo.

As for a LiveCD. A live CD is a linux that runs off a CD/DVD. It's a bit slower than a hard drive install, but lets you run linux on any PC without touching the hard drive (great when you want to use linux on a library computer). The most famous is probably Knoppix, although there's several others.

you can download livecd's (or livedvds) of just about any distro - basically you set your bios to boot from cd. download, burn the iso, and stick it in the drive. It will load up a version of linux to your ramdrive (not touching your hd except maybe a swap) so you can evaluate hardrives in the system with full control or play with linux w/o an entire install.

i'm having trouble touching novell.com, or i'd give ya a link to a suselivecd.iso If you google 'suse livecd' its the second link down.

here are some mirrors:
http://iso.linuxquestions.org/version.php?version=42

and here is a good site:
http://www.frozentech.com/content/livecd.php

apparently: the mac problem can be overcome. may i ask why you are not buying a new harddrive for your machine?

Quote:

Originally Posted by reddazz Many things can go wrong, but because you are using FC, chances of this are really slim because Fedora Core has a good hardware detection tool called Kudzu which runs at boot time (if you haven't disabled it).

well, how do i know that my KUDZU is running or it not disabled in other words?
And if it is disabled, how do i enable it??????

Thanks for your "welcome" J.W.

Quote:

Originally Posted by hockeyman_102 the mac problem can be overcome. may i ask why you are not buying a new harddrive for your machine?

Well, that's because i have to take my HDD to my college's LAB, because we are using some licensed electronic circuit design tools and the problem is that i can't access the LAB from my home do to some connection problems with it.

These tools are installed on my HDD, and i want everything to be on it .

If you did not disable it, then it should be enabled by default. You can check by doing
You should get something like,

I did what you told me reddazz and i guess the KUDZU is ONLINE.

So, i also guess that nothing gonna be wrong, isn't it? I hope so