moving a hard disk to a different computer
Posts: 29
Hello,
Sorry for what may be a silly question. I have mepis lite running on an old computer, that I have set up to dual boot with win98. A friend recently gave me an old computer which however has more modern hardware (pent III - sad to say this is more modern than what I currently have).
I am thinking of unplugging the HDD from my old computer and putting it in the 'new' one.
Do you foresee any problems with this. I want to transfer the hard disk and avoid the trouble of reinstalling everything again.
Thanks for your help.
Some Possible Fixes
Posts: 5513
On some of my production boxes for a company I work for, I have two hard drives: the first is the "Main" drive, and the second is a mirrored "Backup" drive. If the main drive fails, all I have to do is remove the backup drive and put it into the main drive's place. This makes a cheap, non-hot-swappable replacement. I am not using any type of RAID array here, just simple disks.
Here is what I found when I tested this scheme by "accidentally breaking" the system, and swapping the drive. I found that I had to boot up using the Live CD (for these systems, that is rev 3.3.1-1) and then 1) Reload GRUB, and 2) Reload X-Config. These are both available via the "Install" utility.
Why? Well Mepis is pretty darn good at "detecting" hardware, so the fact that the underlying hardware changed, well, just new hardware to detect 
But I was never able to get GRUB to properly load on the second disk's MBR so that's probably the reason why I needed to "reload" GRUB. And as to the reason I had to "reload" X-Config: I have no idea. But I had to, and after that I rebooted the box without the Live CD, and everything was fine
Jon
(edit)
Oh, as to the Windozy thing: Absolutely NO GUARANTEE that that is going to work. I would recommend NOT attempting to dual-boot without first making a backup or three.
follow up
Posts: 29
you were right, no problems at all in Linux. Discovered all the new hardware smoothly...
win98, that's another story. Had to (re)install all the drivers for everything. Painful...
i'm glad you got it done.
Posts: 4864
And I'm glad that the linux end went smoothly.
not a silly question at all
Posts: 4864
if you did this in that other OS we used years ago, you would have trouble.
just put the drive in,
check your work,
reset the bios parameters to see the new drive,
check your work,
and boot.
i expect it to boot and find your new hardware and run sweetly.
the sound card may be troublesome - just let us know.