This is going to be a long post but to start off I'm going to give my system ( now ) specs.. and then my system ( later ) specs.

Abit KG7-raid
AMD Athlon XP 1600 @ 1800
Asus v8420 ( geforce 4 Ti 4200 ) 128 mg
Soundblaster pci 512
Western digital 80 gb 8 mb SE ( windozes partition )
IBM 14 gb 512 cache ( linux partition )
256 megs of 2100 DDR kingston ram
RedHat linux 7.3 2.4.18-3

Later system specs
Epox 8k3ae
amd Athlon XP 1600 @ 1800
Asus v8420
Soundblaster Audigy mp3+
Western digital 80 gb 8 mb SE ( safe harddrive { back-ups, spare harddrive} )
Western digital 40 gb 7200 2 mb cache ( Linux partition )
256 megs of 2100 DDR kingston ram
edhat linux 7.3 2.4.18-3 ( hopefully someone can tell me a good way to upgrade my kernel because the old read-me from redhat isn't working with the new kernel )

1. Is there a way that I can move the information on IBM Harddrive to the Western Digital 40 gb harddrive and still use linux like it been on the Western Digital from the beginning?

2. Are there any modules or patches for the audigy card so I can use it in linux?

3. Do I have to reinstall Linux for the new mother board?

4.I never had more then two harddrive hooked up to a computer ( so this is my first time ) I heard that it is bad to have a harddrive share a ide port with a cd-rom drive, is this right ?
if not how can I set up the jumpers on the harddrives so I won't have two master harddrives and one slave or two slaves and one master harddrive but have more of something like this

Ide port 1 = prime master ( ibm hardrive linux { old linux partition } ) -------- prime slave ( western digital 40 gb { new linux partition } )
Ide port 2 = second master ( western digital 80 gb { remove the windozes partition, make this the spare harddrive } ) --------- second slave ( cd-rom )

and then change it over to this

Ide port 1 = prime master ( western digital 40 gb { new linux partition } )-------- prime slave ( western digital 80 gb { new spare harddrive } )
Ide port 2 = seond master ( cd-rom ) -------- second slave ( dvd-rom )

well I know that it's hard to answer this question if you don't know the jumper settings so you don't have to answer this one fully :-).

5.If I add 5 gigawatts of power to a flux capacitor will I be about to render my display in total 3-d? hahaha :-)

1. Yes, but no matter what you do, you're probably going to have to use a boot floppy or use CD1 as a rescue disk to get to it after you've copied over all of the data. When you change the setup, the GRUB entry that lives right now on the MBR of the Windows 80Gb drive, is going to be pointing at /dev/hdc1, when you want it to be pointed at /dev/hdb1 (most likely). First attach the New 40GB to the old system as the primary Slave, /dev/hdb. The use cfdisk to cut some linux primary and swap partitions on it. Then mount the drive with something like:

mount /dev/hdb1 /mnt/newstuff

Then copy the whole bloody thing over with:

cp -a /* /mnt/newstuff

Then go and get a taco, this is going to take a while, even if this is at ATA66, or 100... depending on gigage, a while.

Then change the /etc/fstab on the new drive so it tries to mount all the important goop as /dev/hdbX not /dev/hdcX

Then test it by creating a NEW Grub entry for the new drive. Reboot the machine, cross fingers, wait until it horks, boot back into the OLD drive, figure out what went wrong. When it all works out, transfer everything to the new machine, should boot normally, albeit kudzo is going to have a field day switching around some hardware profiles.

2. Dunno, I hate sound cards, personally, if kudzo detects it right, more the better. Remember the utility "sndconfig" or is that "soundcfg", something like that, if it sdoesn't work, post back here with the 'multimedia' listing off of the command: "/sbin/lspci" and we'll see what we can get.

3. Not at all, I have a 2Gb Slackware Hard drive and a 1.5Gb OpenBSD drive I just keep on a shelf and drop into machines as needed.

4. a hard drive and a cdrom sharing an IDE is bad? Heck, I gotta go cable half of my living room! It slows transfer rate when both are hammering, that's all, which is near to never an issue. Jumper settings are always manufacturer specific, check western digi's website for the model, or if your lucky, they may have put a little sticker on top of the drive!

6. Oh sure, just because you can buy Plutonium from your corner drugstore and I have to keep ripping of Libian Nationalists and giving them shotty bomb casings full of old 486DX parts.

Cheers,

Finegan

Hey thanks for the help finegen :-) i'm still waiting for my motherboard to come in so I can't ( right now tell you about my sound problem ) but if you can wait alittle longer I will post everything :-) peace out and happy new linux

2. Yes: http://sourceforge.net/projects/emu10k1/

Make sure you read the readme and install files thorougly.

Hey :-) I got my system up and running :-) sound works perfectly thanks Thymox. My new motherboard and harddrive is working very well. thanks again linux addicts :-D hahaha