[clue-tech] New System Configuration

[Jed S. Baer]

On Fri, 21 Sep 2007 19:53:19 -0600
Jed S. Baer wrote:

> Been thinking about a new home system. Definitely not high-end, but it
> should knock the socks off my existing box, even on a budget.
> 
> Gigabyte mobo, 1GB Ram, CoreDuo proc, and a Diamond Stealth X1550 (ATI
> chipset) video card. I don't need the ultra-high end video stuff, and
> with AMD openning up the ATI specs, I expect it'll work well, though
> I'll have to wait a bit for optimum performance -- if it ends up
> mattering to me at all.
> 
> Even with a monitor, I think I can come in under $600. I'll use my
> existing very nice NEC monitor for the new system, and put a cheap 17"
> flatscreen on the old system, which I'll use as a sandbox. I think I'd
> just use existing hard drives I already have. Maybe the CD/DVD drive
> will get me over $600 by a bit.

...

> Hmmm, just realized I hadn't planned on putting a floppy in it.

Well, I took the plunge. Different config than I had planned on, but came
in under budget. The mobo I had planned on buying isn't in stock, maybe
discontinued, so I wound up with a different Gigabyte mobo with onboard
video. Decided to just go with the monitor I have, since it's dual-port,
and I won't really need the console on the old system very often. RAM was
on sale, so I got 2GB instead of 1. And since I didn't buy a video card
and monitor, I picked up another SATA drive too.

However, I had some problems and had to punt.

1st thing is I got in a hurry, and failed to note that my swap is on my
2nd IDE drive. So when I stuck the primary IDE into the new box, that
failed to mount. But that's pretty minor. Init got a ways into startup,
and gave me a password prompt so I could correct whatever issues. This
password prompt had a timeout, however, with "normal" boot proceeding
otherwise, so it wasn't a case of dumping me into the shell because it
couldn't proceed.

Side issue: I discovered that Ubuntu (I guess this is a Debian thing, not
just Ubuntu) doesn't provide the runlevel differences that every other
unix/linux I've used does. I had noticed, when messing around with
enabling/disabling things, that rl 2, 3, and 5 looked identical, but
didn't think about it much at the time. Also, Ubuntu doesn't
use /etc/inittab at all, and if you look at /etc/event.d/rc-default,
you'll see that when it looks at /proc/cmdline, it checks only for
single-user, not any other runlevel. If inittab isn't there (as of Feisty,
you have to create it by hand if you want it), it defaults to rl2. So, no
wonder I noticed (later on) that init was trying to load kdm, even though
I specified rl3 on the kernel line. Yes, I had taken X/kdm out of rl3. I
just assumed I was always booting to rl5, but in fact, I'm booting to rl2
by default. So if you want boot-time control over runlevels in Ubuntu
Feisty (and onward), create a 1-liner /etc/inittab with the default
runlevel line, and remember that even for 1-time reboot to a runlevel
different from 2 (except for s, single, S, but not 1 -- it doesn't check
for 1, just synonyms for 1) you'll need to edit it.

Anyways, it appears that the new machine presents IDE drives as SATA,
even if they're PATA, that is that what was /dev/hda becomes /dev/sda. So
when I got to the command line, I had to edit /etc/fstab, which is when I
noticed that I had no swap. Well, the system should run without swap,
especially with 2GB ram, but I went ahead and connected my other IDE
drive (needed to copy stuff off it anyway, but had planned on using my
external drive bay), and the system won't come up with it connected. It
just loops through resetting the controller, and then complaining. Sorry
for the lack of detail here, it was getting late, and I was more
concerned about whether I'd be able to recover by putting the old machine
back together.

On putting the old machine back together, I again attempted to come up to
rl3 (hadn't made my discovery yet), but got dumped to the command line
anyways, due to fstab issues. That was fine, because I knew I'd have to
fix it anyway. Got it fixed, and old machine is up fine. What I did
notice though, was that in doing the verbose text-mode boot, is that even
this old machine is complaining, on startup, about DMA issues with hdc.
Well, it's an old drive. It's just that this not quite so old mobo is
able to deal with it and come up. I guess the new one is more picky.

Anyways, that's the long-winded preamble to the question of how to
proceed from here. With the new SATA drive, I don't care quite so much
about re-using my existing system drive. But, I'm not too keen on having
to reinstall and then re-do all my package de/selections and
configurations. So I'm trying to think of the easiest way to transfer the
system from the old IDE to the new SATA drive. I guess this resembles
bare-metal recovery, which I've never really gotten into in Unix/Linux.

1 option, if it's possible, is to just install to the new drive, and
then, if apt/dpkg or something has a way, tell it to look at my existing
installed package list, and add/remove to match it.

The other option would be to partition, make the root filesystem and swap,
write an MBR, and then tar from the old drive to the new one. I'd have to
boot a live CD to do it, which is no biggie, I guess. What issues would I
have with this?

jed