Greetings my friends!
I am planning on changing the motherboard or my desktop. I have a hard disk with Debian, Fedora and Ubuntu in a multiboot system. I want to know if like windows, linux will recognize the newboard and video card and will do all the necessary detections and correction or will I have to do something else to let the system work? All your help will be appreciated.Thank you

Guys...any ideas? (if you need any more info let me know)

Hi,

Linux is not like M$Windows!

If you compiled a custom kernel for a family of processor and your new mother board has the same processor then yes it should recognize the MB. The problem may be the chipset and drivers for the subsystems may have to be loaded (if available). If the MB is recent then you may have some problems getting the drivers if the chipset is too new and no drivers for the new MB are yet developed.

You should research the needs of the MB you are thinking of purchasing to see if there is driver support for it.

Thanks for rour answer. I am changing a slot A jabil kadoka motherboard of 900 mhz for a D845GERG2 D845PECE E210882 Intel Desktop Board of 2 ghz ( is an old board too but a little bit faster than mine) with and agp card Mad Dog Multimedia FX 5200 plus 128mb . By what you say I extrapolate that possibly I will need to reinstall the 3 OS's?
I must say that I used it with a live cd (knoppix) and it worked fine.

Hi,

If everything worked with KNOPPIX, then you should get all the driver information from the KNOPPIX boot. That will get you a heads up to get a new install.

If the installed kernels are i386 or i486 compatible, then it would run on any modern Intel or AMD machine. If the kernels are more specialized (i586, i686, K6, K7) then they might not boot properly.

For the display you just have to check taht the correct drivers exist for your hardware and edit the X configuration file to specify the X driver.

Since you can boot the Knoppix disc, you can always fix any problems using that disc.

If you didn't customize the kernel then it will work just fine.

You might still run in to difficulties with peripherals. If, for example, in addition to the chipset's basic disk drive connectors, you have additional SATA/PATA connectors provided by an add-on chip, that may require drivers that were not originally necessary. There is a good chance of preventing this problem being a 'show stopper' if you don't use any of these add on-ports in your hardware build.

In a similar way, if the two mobos use different systems for audio, audio may not work until you load the drivers for the new part (and prevent loading of the old one). It seems likely that you can get around this by not considering audio as a show stopper at all. And building on the suggestion of using, e.g., knoppix, using it to determine which drivers are necessary and which not and you can then ensure that the right drivers are loaded.

I will try changing the motherboard and let you know how it goes.Thank you very much for all your ideas.

I think linux will not reconize your mother board, I ve changed my mobo yet, and result is me must reinstall my ubuntu

I tried putting the hard disc with DEBIAN, UBUNTU AND FEDORA in it into the new motherboar hoping it will work. It start showing the OS present ans asking to select one (as it always does). But when I select an OS the system start to "load" it but never finish , something like the verbose mode appears saying what is happening and the all of a sudden it stops.You get the blinking cursor and when you hit enter the cursor just go down one notch on the screen. Does this means I have to do a fresh installation of the 3 os? Tahnk you