> My Father in law has a lot of software and important files that he > really can't afford to loose or go through re-installing programs. The > guy told him a story that in windoze XP you can not just put an old HDD > onto a new MB? > > I offered to call the guy, as I had done this many times when I was a > sys admin at my last place of work. So, I called the guy, and we > exchanged in "professional dialogue" and things didn't turn out too > well. > > Anyway, I have since found out that he was right! (I am eating humble > pie......large portion) and find this absolutely ridiculous. > > So....my question is..... > > What ever flavour Linux whether Ubuntu or Redhat or Fedora, will this be > the same? Could I take the HDD (80 gig about 2 years old) out of my > wife's desktop and install it into a brand new computer and still boot > up?
I posted recently on the same question to this list and was told it would almost certainly work OK. I backed everything up with Mondo then with trepidation changed motherboards.... I had to do some dancing with fstab. The fstab problem might not effect everyone - I had one sata plus one ide HDD and that was "interesting", but nothing monumental. I also had some fun with eth0/eth3 (why 3?) which caused some oddities with dhcp-server. I think if there had been only one drive, it would have been pretty much a straight swap. Oh.. and the reason for the change in my case was to go to pci-e graphics, so dpkg-reconfigure xorg-xserver came into play. In other words, it works well for Ubuntu, but be ready for some tuning. I could boot into a perfectly usable console first try. OTOH, OS X will boot on anything from anything! Why aren't they all THAT easy! -- SLUG - Sydney Linux User's Group Mailing List - http://slug.org.au/ Subscription info and FAQs: http://slug.org.au/faq/mailinglists.html
