Hi Again,

Please see my previous post about extreme disk slowness:

http://www.linuxquestions.org/questi...d.php?t=548516

Having only one production server, and no budget to buy a new one, I installed linux on a older machine (supermicro MB, p3 450), and then moved the disks to the production machine (supermicro P3TDER, dual p3 1266).

Everything works great - except that large file transfers run very slowly, and latch up the machine for minutes at a time.

I always thought that linux installations were mostly machine agnostic, as long as you are using X.

Is it possible that transferring the disks in this manner is the source of my slow disk problem? Is there anything I can check to see if this is the case?

As I mentioned, this is a production server so I can't take it offline for long. So I don't have hours to mess around with installing and reinstalling.

Please, no heck for screwing up my production server - money is too tight to buy a new server just to do a software upgrade.

Thanks for your help.

agnostic as long as you run X??

basically you should be able to drop a disk in an hardware, as there are little persisitent details about what low level hardware is in use. obviously you're wanting the same cpu architecture but other than that you are ok. could easily be DMA on the drives or something?

Moving a disk may work but there is no guarantee.
I have moved Debian and Suse disks successfully. I have had Suse fail on a move on a separate computer.
Consider the differences between the two computers. Be prepared to check configuration on anything different.

(deleted dup post)

you can transfer the disk as long as you know how to repair grub, device driver, display, fstab, mtab, mbr.
Anyway, I can't undestand your problem very well, are you want to purchase a new hard disk and copy everything inside?

Regards,
Ks

you can transfer the disk as long as you know how to repair grub, device driver, display, fstab, mtab, mbr.
Anyway, I can't understand your problem very well, are you want to purchase a new hard disk and copy everything inside?

Regards,
Ks

Oops, I meant to say that you can do it if you AREN'T using X -- no worry about video card device drivers. In my case I don't have X Windows installed, and they are both P3 machines.

I looks like the problem I am having with my disks being extremely slow is the same one that these people are having:

http://forums.gentoo.org/viewtopic-t...5bfbaf9c7d2e08

Anyway, the point of this exercise was to be able to install and configure Linux on a spare machine, then take those disks to the colo facility and quickly upgrade the production box by dropping those disks in.

It worked fine except for the hangs I get whenever I do any intensive disk writing -- for example, bonnie++ will block all access to the disk for other processes for an hour or so as it crawls along at 1MB/s or so.

But hdparm is set up correctly and reports decent throughput. Very odd.