On 28 February 2013 21:58, steve-ALUG@hst.me.uk wrote:
I may need to update a machine's innards, so I'd like to know - did you basically just put the old hard drive on the new motherboard & case etc and it booted, just like that, without having to reinstall anything?
I can't comment on what Peter did, but generally speaking I've always found that a disk from a Linux PC will transfer to new hardware without issue. The biggest potential problem that I can think of would be a change to graphics hardware, but even then unless you have a customer X config it should just work itself out.
This is in stark contrast to almost never being able to move a Windows HDD between systems and expect it to even boot....
Of-course there are two good reasons for this. First, Linux generally has the drivers for everything built in, so changing hardware means using different drives that it already has, rather than (as with Windows) needing new drivers to be installed, and frequently needing the drivers installing before you can get to the point of installing them... Secondly, Windows licencing is built around it not being moved between hardware so it actively looks for changes and treats them as hostile.