Right now I have a computer with 3 hard drives, and i'll be getting a new computer soon. Two of those hard drives have most of my programs, downloads, etc, and the remaining one has everything else.

What is the easiest way to move everything from those hard drives (preferablly all of them) to a new computer?
I don't need to leave the hard drives in my old computer - if it would work i'd like to just be able to put them in the new computer and have Kudzu remove the old hardware and install the new hardware, but i'm not sure if that would work.
Thanks!

I would tend to reinstall on a new drive then mount the data drives on the new box. Then you can copy the data or leave it on those drives as data drives.

The problem with that is most (if not all) of the programs are in /usr/bin, /usr/local/bin, etc, and those aren't on the data drives.
So i'd pretty much have to reinstall everything, which is why i'd like to just be able to boot from what I have now.
But if that's not possible i'll just do what you suggested.

You can try but I think you will be asking for trouble unless the architechture of the machines is the same and the chipset is similar.

The architecture is i686 on both, and they're a P3 and a Athlon XP.
Do you think that's close enough?

The only time I have ever tried it and it worked was between to P3s I tried it between a Duron and a P4 and it failed. I may have been able to fix it but I just reinstalled instead.

It shouldn't lose any data from the drives so there would be no harm in trying then if it fails you can get you can reinstall anyway.

Ok, i'll try it.
Thanks!

You wont have any hardware problems with a generic kernel, the one that comes precompiled with your distro for example, and it's not that hard to migrate a linux install to a new hard drive.


[edit] You will have to reconfigure sound and video, and any onboard components that differ from your old box after the transfer - do your research first, and rember, backups are good mmkayyyy.[/edit]

The only different components will be my motherboard, proccessor, sound card, and video card.
I can configure the sound card with sndconfig, but how do I configure the video card?

Depends on the video card, if it's an nvidia you install the nvidia driver and edit your XF86Config(-4) according to the instructions in the nvidia readme file, ati cards are similar but the drivers are not as good as nvidia's.

It's an old ATI Rage 128 Pro, I know xfree86 supports it, but i'm not sure how to install the drivers.
I'll google it.