[NCLUG] Hard drive only Linux install.

Benson Chow blc at q.dyndns.org
Tue Dec 19 14:09:56 MST 2006


I've had some interesting (but somewhat expected) issues with moving disks 
from machine to machine.

Basically, P2- optimized installs will work in just about all P2/P3/P4/K7, 
but the P4/K7 (and x86-64, but that's another story) optimized kernels 
_tend_ to not boot in anything but the particular machine it was optimized 
for.

I'm not sure if the stock kernels from FC, SuSE, Debian, etc. these days 
include "generic x86" support but it was sufficient to not allow my custom 
gentoo-compiled K7 disk to work in my P4.

I have not seen any "generic" usermode programs that produce inoperable 
code yet though.  Basically anything with special CPU support and the 
kernels appear to be specific to a certain microarchitecture, else most 
binaries are interchangeable.  After I swapped the K7 kernel for a P4 one, 
it proceeded to boot.

I suppose these are coverred in other posts, but obviously 
video/sound/network/etc. drivers likely will be different from 
machine to machine, which is the other possible issues you'll run into 
while swapping disks.

-bc

On Tue, 19 Dec 2006, Darrin Goodman wrote:
[snip]
> as the hard drive was coming out of a P4 machine and going into a P3
> machine.  I could not get it to boot on the P3 machine.  It's been a while
> since I tried this so I honestly don't recall what sort of errors were
> produced when I tried to boot the P3 machine.
[snip]



More information about the NCLUG mailing list