On Wed, 2009-02-04 at 13:10 +0000, samwise wrote:
Hi,
My PC hardware is getting somewhat long in the tooth now, and is running Debian Testing AMD64. At some point, I'll probably end up inheriting or buying a new mainboard, RAM and graphics card.
..
How well would Linux cope if I swapped out the guts of the PC like this?
You asked for comments from someone who has done it before. I don't have the experience with the encryption though I have swapped a mainboard and still been able to boot the new system.
When I last did this, which was a while ago now, the kernel was a custom one with things like IDE and filesystem drivers built in so I checked that the kernel had the necessary drivers for the new mainboard. If that was OK at least I would be able to boot on the new mainboard and sort out other things afterwards.
These days most distribution kernels have just about every imaginable driver compiled as a module and rely on hotplug/udev to load the modules for the hardware actually found. In the case of drivers for filesystems and disk controllers these would also go an initial ramdisk so the modules can still be loaded based on what is found, but before the proper root filesystem is mounted.
I'd try it and see. If you can't make it work you can always fall back on re-installing. I'd make sure I had the encryption key written down and a note of the partitions that should not be reformatted before you do the mainboard swap so that if you swap and it won't boot you don't have to swap back to get this info before running the installer.
Regards, Steve.