I will be doing the following to see if I can come up with a recovery procedure.

I will be installing RH9 on a system. The actual specs are not really relavant, but for argument sake, it will be a single P4 system with a fairly basic hardware config. I will then remove the Hard Drive containing the Linux os, and placing it in a completely different system. The hardware on the other system is considerably different. It will be a dual Xeon system with many different hardware components.

Now, I do not expect Linux to boot without any problems. Obviously, all of the new hardware in the system is going to cause a ton of grief. In fact, I don’t expect Linux to even boot at all.

The reason I’m doing this is because I will be building a new server soon with completely different specs. I will then want to move my hard drive from the old machine to the new one with all of the new and different hardware. I figure I should practice this before trying to do it on my actual file server.

Any help is appreciated.

you can keep a lot of your previous linux os. relevant things are your network configuration (number of cards), compiled for machine-arch-depended software and things like lilo/grub, optimizations(elvtune/sysctl/..).
the only thing apart is to build a new kernel for your new machine (fitting to your new hardware) and get lilo/grub/!BIOS boot from the right drive.
i've done that a couple of times now (ex. p66>p133>pii300 with a little box at home) and it worked without much trouble.

since you're going to use multiple processors (and i don't have any expirience with this issue) it might be better to set up the machine from the scratch. this will give you the possibility to optimize your programms for smp.

sl mritch.