[clue-tech] upgrade question

[Adam bultman]

Charles Oriez wrote:

> I have a P1 that is running Suse 9.0 and Win2k dual boot.  I'm tired 
> of the lack of speed and memory, but don't want to reinstall the 
> existing aps or risk losing data.
>
> If I buy a P4 sans hard drives and just slap in my two existing 
> physical hard drives, will the system be smart enough to pick up on 
> the hardware changes during the boot process, or am I risking some 
> unsuspected system chaos?
>
How were you running Windows 2000 and Suse 9.0 on a Pentium?  Don't 
those only go to like, 233?

I've done a few things like this before, but never with such a large 
change in hardware.  Pentium 2 to pentium 3, single to dual, etc.

Windows may sit for about an hour and ask for drivers, but it *should* 
be able to *boot* correctly, although I can't promise it'll be the most 
stable thing in the world.  Since it's got to upgrade so many drivers, 
it may kinda wonk it out (It shouldn't, but sometimes it does) .   
Changing motherboards is usually easy with Windows, but YMMV.

For Linux, if you have a decent kernel with all the drivers you need, 
and your binaries/libraries are not CPU specific, you should be able to 
swap out the hardware.  Kudzu, or whatever else runs to detect new 
hardware'll go nuts. 

Again, your mileage may WILDLY vary.  Give it a shot, it can't hurt! If 
all else fails, pop in a knoppix disk, back it up somewhere, and see if 
you can rebuild without formatting.

Adam