[clue-tech] upgrade question

[David Anselmi]

Charles Oriez wrote:
[...]
> 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?

Since IDE controllers have changed a lot since P1 you should get the new 
machine with a disk (ATA 133 or whatever--part of the speed up you'll 
see on new hardware is higher IDE throughput).

You can't move your Win2k install to a new motherboard.  Period, end of 
sentence, been there, done that.  The reason is that Windows uses a 
driver that is chipset specific to your IDE controller.  Once you go to 
a new controller Windows will choke when it loads the wrong driver (it 
will "boot" but then will give you a stop 0x7B).  I have seen registry 
hacks you can use to change the driver but they're ugly (even as 
registry hacks go).

So once you've got your new machine, if it has a shiny new disk, 
partition it and install Windows.  If you want Win2k and all your apps, 
back up the old machine and restore to the new (Windows backup is smart 
enough to merge the new/old drivers in the registry).  You'll still have 
some driver reinstalls to do, most likely but they should be easy.

If you don't want your apps you can leave the new install as is, or 
upgrade to XP (or whatever comes with the P4).  If you don't have a new 
disk do the same thing (backup, reinstall, restore) on the old disk.

For Linux you can put the new disk in the old box, partition the free 
space for Linux and format, cp -ax your data to the new drive, and 
install a boot loader.  Move the new drive to the new box and boot.  I 
can't say how easily SuSE will handle the new hardware but once you 
change the various config files to use the correct drivers all should be 
well.  That should be easy but it depends how adept you are at 
configuring things that aren't autodetected (and you don't have the 
installer "let me set this up for you routines" to help).

Seems to me you've got the experience to handle the driver tweaking, and 
putting the boot loader on the new drive while booted off the old one. 
Just have to pay attention to what you're doing since you probably don't 
do it every day.

HTH,
Dave