Hey everyone,

I just recently upgraded my main pc, and want to put the old hardware in my current home server, and upgrade that a bit...

This hardware consists of motherboard, cpu, ram and graphics card...

But, it will still contain the same drives, so i am just wondering, amd i able to just stick in the new hardware, and boot off the old hdd, and it should work?

Im running opensuse 10.2

I'm guessing know, as all the hardware drivers are already prob there, and a fresh install would be the prefered option...only reason im asking is i dont really wanna have to setup my services again...but will if it means there is a stability issue with new hardware on old install.

Cheers,
Justin

It would have been faster for you to try this idea than to post a question and ask about it.

SuSE does all of its hardware configuration during system startup. In other words it doesn't have drivers in the kernel. This means that you should be able to move a SuSE system disk from one computer to another with very few problems. The only problem will come from the X Window software since that is configured for the graphic card on the last computer that the operating system ran on.

Hi, and thanks for your reply..

Well, i wasnt sure, and didnt want to go breaking things..coz thats usually what happens when i fiddle... :-P

is there anyway to reset the x window drivers from a terminal?

as in, when i boot, boot only to a prompt (how to do this?)..and then run the x config from there...then reboot into x with new drivers?

Cheers,
Justin

Most mega distros have a boot option for "recovery mode" - that's usually single user, so won't run X.
Else highlight the grub entry and hit the <e> key - add " 1" (blank-one) to the end of the kernel line, hit enter, and <b> to boot. This is a "one-time" change.

Backup your xorg.conf, and play around.
When happy, "init 5" (or whatever the X runlevel is) to get things back to normal. Or just reboot.

Yea, X should be your only issues as long as your drives aren't moved around (in which case, boot from a bootable linux CD and mount /, and edit /etc/fstab as needed.

If you need to restart X once up, CTRL-ALT-BACKSPACE from inside the X server will restart it. otherwise, do as above or figure out what your single-user runlevel is and switch to it using "init #" where # is the runlevel.


Best to set your X configuration file from a liveCD to generic settings that will work first. Remember you can comment lines out with a single '#' at the start.

I should have included in my first post that SuSE has a nice X configuration utility called sax2. You can run it from the console without starting X. So as the posts above have said, you can boot to run level 1, log on as root, and run sax2. This will allow you to set the xorg.conf file. The only thing that sax2 won't do is to change the driver so if the first computer had an ATI card and the second computer has an Nvidia card then you will have to change that by hand.