Hard drive/Laptop swap - will fedora croak?

[Genes MailLists]

On 07/15/2011 08:31 PM, Gary Waters wrote:
> I set up a Fedora 15 installation on a laptop with an  intel based
> chipset. I just got an AMD ( Turion ) chipset notebook. I assume
> swapping the hard drive will result in the fedora installation crashing?
> If such is the case, other than a fresh install, is there a way to do it
> which will work?
>
> Gary

I suspect it will work unless you have a 64 bit kernel and the newer
on is only 32 bit.

You may need to fiddle with networking again as the mac addresses
probably changed ...

[Konstantin Svist]

On 07/15/2011 05:31 PM, Gary Waters wrote:
> I set up a Fedora 15 installation on a laptop with an  intel based 
> chipset. I just got an AMD ( Turion ) chipset notebook. I assume 
> swapping the hard drive will result in the fedora installation 
> crashing? If such is the case, other than a fresh install, is there a 
> way to do it which will work?

Usually the biggest problem (at least in my experience) is with sata 
drivers. The trick is to run mkinitrd and force it to include the 
correct module for the new motherboard (old one should be included by 
default, so there's practically no way to mess this up)

[Sam Varshavchik]

Gary Waters writes:
> « HTML content follows »
> I set up a Fedora 15 installation on a laptop with an  intel based chipset. I  
> just got an AMD ( Turion ) chipset notebook. I assume swapping the hard drive  
> will result in the fedora installation crashing? If such is the case, other  
> than a fresh install, is there a way to do it which will work?

It's unlikely that any drastic actions will be needed. Fedora will boot just  
fine. The only situation where Fedora won't boot would be if you move a 64  
bit Fedora install onto a system with a 32 bit CPU, of course.

The most you will have to do is to reconfigure a few things. Fedora keeps  
stuff like network configuration settings associated for each device. When  
you boot the new hardware, Fedora will likely see a new network device, so  
you may need to refiddle your network settings. Audio might need some manual  
reconfiguration too.

X.org is of sufficiently robust shape that it will come up on any new  
hardware that it supports without any issues. Of course the video hardware  
in your new laptop must be supported by X.org. If you're using Nvidia's or  
AMD's binary blob drivers, all bets are off, who knows what they will do.

[Tom Horsley]

On Fri, 15 Jul 2011 20:31:25 -0400
Gary Waters wrote:
> I set up a Fedora 15 installation on a laptop with an  intel based chipset. I just got an AMD ( Turion ) chipset notebook. I assume swapping the hard drive will result in the fedora installation crashing? If such is the case, other than a fresh install, is there a way to do it which will work?

I don't think there is any way to know for sure other than try it and
see what happens, but I know when I swapped my AMD based motherboard for
an Intel I was pleasantly surprised to find everything working when
I booted up off then same old disk.