[NCLUG] Preparing to upgrade motherboard, questions

[John L. Bass]

	Hi all. Looks like a new motherboard is in my near future, and I'm 
	curious to hear if anyone can tell this Linux newbie what to expect with 
	the Linux side of my system when I upgrade. I will of course back 
	everything up first, but I'd rather not have to do a complete restore of 
	all my software and data, email, etc.

By far the easiest/safest way to upgrade is grab a second IDE hard drive and configure
it as hdb, partion and format it. Clone every thing of interest ... typically
/etc, /var, and /home to the second drive using tar, rsync, find/cpio or cp 
using archive or backup option to preserve file modes. Then do a fresh install
on the system drive - which is generally a lot faster than an upgrade, and
frequently safer. Then restore /home, and selectively pick off files from /etc and
var as needed to reconfigure. There may be other application/site specific
directorys that might make it worth cloning the entire drive first.

John