My dual-boot (XP/Ubuntu 7.10) PC gave up the ghost, so a shop built me a new PC but using the hard drive from my old PC. Their technician did an XP "update install" on the Windows partition, which is a way of XP updating itself to run on the new hardware, without having to do a complete reinstall. Even the Grub bootloader survived.

However, not surprisingly, Ubuntu won't boot anymore since the motherboard, graphics, sound etc are all different.

Is there an update-install option I can do in Ubuntu to update it to my new hardware, or is it really just a case of reformatting the existing partition, and installing it from the CD again, from scratch? I have my Home directory on a separate partition, so this is not affected.

If /home is on a separate partition, then I suggest you do a reinstall (making sure you do not reformat /home).

Yes, I thought so. Thanks.