Boot it from lilo or floppy - no worries. But then the interesting stuff kicks in...
If the hard drive configs aren't the same and your distro doesn't use disk-labels, there will be trouble. For example, say you installed linux onto a disk that linux thinks is /dev/hda (ie the first drive - C drive) and then moved the disk to the new machine as /dev/hdb (ie the second drive - D drive), then the /etc/fstab - which lists what partitions to mount - is going to be wrong. Some distro's, like Redhat 9, use disk(partition) labels instead of the physical device names, so this won't be a problem. Of course you can edit the /etc/fstab before moving the drive so that it will be correct for the new machine - or you can fix problems after they occur by using a maintenance distro bootable CD (eg knoppix) to mount your / partition and edit /etc/fstab. Remember that CDROM drives may cause disk devices to differ as well depending on which IDE bus they are connected to.
If the original installation hardware - mainboard, graphics card, network card, ... differs from the new box, you might run into problems. If your disto can't detect and reconfigure itself for all the changed hardware during boot up, you could be toast. However, some distros, can auto-detect major changes on the way up. Redhat's Kudzu hardware detector successfully coped with a friend changing his mainboard.
If you attempt this and the graphics cards aren't the same, then make sure the system is running in a vanilla console mode - no fancy resolutions. And configure it not to run X-windows - i.e. set the run level to 4 by editing /etc/inittab. In fact, it would be safest to do this even if the cards are the same.
Quote:
Originally posted by flamesrock
Hi,
I was wondering, if I install linux on a hardrive, and then move that hardrive into a new box, will I be able to boot it by floppy or lilo if I set the bios to recognize it as a slave? Even if linux wasn't installed in the presence of the motherboard, PCI cdroms or anything else on the system? Would there be many problem?
-Thanks
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