On 19/09/16 17:08, Paul Tansom wrote:
** Mark Rogers mark@more-solutions.co.uk [2016-09-19 09:48]:
On 18 September 2016 at 09:29, Chris Green cl@isbd.net wrote:
It *might* but personally I'd install a new OS on the target machine on a new disk and then add the old disk from the other machine.
In my experience it is far more likely to work with Linux than with Windows. Whether it's a good opportunity to go for a fresh install to have a spring clean is a good question, but it should "just work".
<snip> > On top of that, especially in newer versions, the hardware will play a > key role in validating the license, so even if everything is OK from a > driver point of view Windows may still refuse to function. > > Contrast all that with Linux; all the drivers are there within the O/S > and if the hardware has changed it'll just use different drivers, and > there is no licensing to validate. I've done it several times with Linux and had no problems, it isn't guaranteed though. If I think back some years to a scenario where it wouldn't have (although I didn't need to or try), I had a server I was replacing that was running Debian and the new hardware (customer supplied) had nVidia chipsets throughout. Graphics and sound were no problem since bing a server had no need (no desktop), but i/o was a major issue since Debian didn't supply the drivers because of the licensing, etc.. I spent a while trying, but ended up trying Ubuntu 16.06 (which sort of dates this!) and that is one of the things that pushed my switch of distro. If I'd just swapped disks it wouldn't have worked.
Windows wise I have done it, but it has never gone nicely. One desktop I tried had two changes of hardware before the Windows boot had a significant enough kick to force a reinstall of the relevant drivers to get it working gain (I used that boot so little I hadn't sorted it out in a year or so!). That said there were still drivers and software kicking around that I couldn't uninstall that caused the odd issue.
I'm currently raided (Raid 1, 2 disks mirrored). Presumably I should do this again?
Personally I think RAID is just a nuisance which will make a disk failure more difficult to clear up than otherwise. Make sure important stuff is backed up (e.g. /home and /etc) and then just have 'ordinary' disks.
There is no substitute for backups. That said I find software raid (mdadm) and RAID1 to be very easy to work with, and very easy to migrate between machines etc. I would never use hardware RAID these days because I need to be sure I can access the data in different hardware if it comes to it, and I'd likely avoid RAID5 etc where each single disk doesn't contain a coherent set of data, but with mdadm RAID 1 I've never had a problem replacing disks or taking a disk out of a failed machine and accessing its data in different hardware. LVM on the other hand...
I wouldn't use it instead of backup, but a software RAID mirror works very nicely under Linux to improve resilience and is just as easy to recover data from as a single disk setup. It also makes it easy to increase the size of the physical drives even without LVM - which I have done a few times in the past by dropping out one drive, installing a new one with larger partitions, sync'ing the data, swapping the second drive in and sync'ing and then expanding the partitions. :)
** end quote [Mark Rogers]
Thanks for the comments folks. When I'm feeling brave, I'll give it a try, and I may see if I can afford some new disks too!
Incidentally, (and Off-topically), In the days of yore, under windows, when swapping disks from one windows machine to another, sometimes, if it didn't work first time, I then did a windows install "over the top" of the existing installation. This tended to keep the existing configuration and fix any issues with drivers etc. I was a MSDN subscriber at the time so had access to MSDN Windows disks which were a bit more forgiving at doing "upgrade installs" than retail ones.
Doubt it'd work now, but thankfully, I don't need to try!
Cheers Steve