G'day every one, got a will i have to formatt the hard drive when i fit a new mother board , i know have too with windows i was told you can get away with linux if you stuck with the same brand & model mother board ,the problem is i cannot get the same brand ,so the one i have got is a gigabyte (GA-G31MX-S2)intel G31 chipset model board with a WD320 SATA HDD 750watt powersupply 7900GS 256DDR3 nivida card 2gig 667hz ram and a poineer 109 IDE DL burner with PClinux OS 2007 already installed on the HDD, so in the next day or so iam going to get this motherboard installed and hope too god it will boot, and if it works can i boot up on another live distro it has sam linux on the live dvd ,can you install one linux dristro over another one will it formatt automatically for you and install sam linux or wot ever happens, any how can some one help me please with this thankyou very much mr norm.

There is no need to format and reinstall because you changed the MoBo - what a bizarre notion.

The worst case is that the kernel doesn't have some drivers built in (for example, the MoBo has a brand new SATA controller) and initrd doesn't include those drivers. In that case you only need to boot from something like a LiveCD and fix up the initrd image. It's not the most trivial thing to do, but if you need to do it just post again.

Linux doesn't care if you change your hardware around as long as it has drivers supporting it

You can freely move HDDs from system to system with nothing bad happening, so I don't see any reason to format a HDD because you change motherboards.

If you've compiled your own kernel and removed anything from it, it's advisable to install a default kernel from your distro's repository, with nothing removed, before you swap out your motherboard.

udev might give you some trouble by trying to use your old NIC, based on its MAC address. I recently described how to fix that problem, on Debian at least, here.

Another possibility for trouble is if your system drive is given a different address than you had previously. If under your old setup, the system drive was /dev/hda, it'll need to remain as /dev/hda when attached to the new motherboard. If it's presented as /dev/sda you'll have to boot a liveCD or something and edit at least the fstab (and grub's menu.list or lilo's lilo.conf).

As others have said already, the only big issue you're likely to run into is if your new hardware requires a driver that's not in your kernel. Probably only a disk controller with no driver will keep you from booting though. Most other parts, if they have no driver, simply won't work, but won't prevent you from booting into a system usable enough to get them working.

yep, provided you have nothing totally custom set up thats tied to the MBO then there should be no problem....


with windows however you will need to reinstall
and in the case of v***a you will need to BUY a new licence
as micro$oft define a new motherboard to be what defines a "new" computer

never mind ...

Brilliant, I am going to try this over the weekend.

Tony