Will Ubuntu on USB work on different computers?
 

First, the reason for this was my dad tried to do a ditro upgrade to 7.04. Starting with 6.06LTS, the upgrade to 6.10 was flawless, but the second upgrade from 6.10 to 7.04 hung when configuring wvdial. Afterward it freezes during startup. I booted it in recovery mode to see the messages and it always stops after /scripts/init-bottom.

His Ubuntu is on a Seagate 60GB USB disk. He left it with me to try to fix. I backed up his /home, /boot and xorg.conf. I'm new to Ubuntu so I think the easiest solution is to reinstall. I tried something involving chroot and dpkk --configure -a but it didn't help.

As the subject suggests, I want to know if, since I have his disk with me, can I install 7.04 from my computer, restore his backed up files, and expect it to work on his computer? Both are 32-bit cpu architecture with 1GB DDR RAM so I think the main hardware differences will be sound, video, nic and mobo resources.

Since you are using the generic kernels, there shouldn't be any problems with actually booting and running.

Like you said, audio and video will likely need to be reconfigured on the new hardware, but nothing that would keep the machine from at least booting so you can get in and make the needed changes.

Thanks, MS3FGX. That's very good to know. And that's exactly why I backed up the original xorg.conf. It will be the generic kernel that comes with 7.04. I'll just have to see what happens with the audio and network when he gets it back.

Just to follow up:

When it was installed from my laptop it installed GRUB to the MBR of my laptop's disk. The next day when I started my laptop all I saw was GRUB error 15. Oops! It's good that I keep a Slackware boot disk with me so I was able to restore LILO. I don't remember the Ubuntu installer asking me where to install the boot loader. I figured out how to install GRUB onto the USB disk's MBR and, to make a long story short, I was able to boot from it on my sister's computer (but not mine because of USB 1.1 limits), which has an Athlon64. The last hurdle was that during boot it stopped on an fsck error about not being able to resolve a UUID. After a quick Google search I edited the fstab and commented the line that includes that ID, which happened to be /dev/hda1 (from my laptop), and then it booted perfectly. I restored his old settings from the backup and now the only thing missing is his background picture, which is probably on his /dev/hda1.

Thanks again.

Yeah, I forgot all about the boot loader possibly causing an issue. Good to hear you got worked out in the end though.

Question..

Did you have to change your BIOS to look for a USB drive to boot from?


thanks