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Upgrading the Motherboards of Linux Boxen? 35

Posted by Cliff from the things-to-watch-out-for-in-basic-HW-maintenance dept.
synchronicity asks: "I just got a new motherboard and processor and would otherwise like to keep my system setup exactly as it is now. Every site I have visited about upgrading a motherboard and processor ends with something to the effect of 'When your machine boots up, Windows will be confused for a little bit, but will detect all your hardware as new, reboot itself a few times, and then you'll be up and running again.' All well and good, except that I don't run Windows. So what do I need to do to get my Linux (Mandrake 7.2) system to recognize the new PCI bus addresses/interrupts/etc. to make this upgrade a success?" What things do you do in preparation for such a procedure?
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Upgrading the Motherboards of Linux Boxen? More

Upgrading the Motherboards of Linux Boxen?

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  • And it will start up (text mode will defineately work)

    then you recompile the kernel to include the new drivers ( or you compile them as modules and you're done in 30 sec )

    voila

  • Do the same (Score:2, Insightful)

    by nomis80 ( 181676 )
    Do the same as in Windows, but without the reboots. ;)

    Serious, Linux's hardware management is way superior to Windows', provided the hardware is compliant (which is most of it now that ISA PNP is out). Try it, you'll be surprised.
    • I've noticed the same thing. Setting up the drivers on linux doesn't require a reboot (if you you already have the drivers avaible to the kernel) and IT CAN ACTUALY AUTOMATICLY REMOVE HARDWARE. Seriously, when I moved my NIC to a new slot, windows made me remove it then reinstall the driver, while linux just figured it out without so much as a warning.

  • Simple... (Score:3, Informative)

    by ameoba ( 173803 ) on Monday October 29, 2001 @07:40PM (#2495087)
    If you're using the stock Mandrake kernel and -just- changing the motherboard, you should just be able to reboot and go to town since it's already got damned near everything compiled in or available as a module. If you've gone and compiled a custom kernel, you just need to make one that's correct for your new mobo and boot from that.

    Even changing mobos on windows isn't -that- bad. I've got my dad's machine still running the factory win95 install (he refuses to let me reinstall or upgrade) after both a mobo and HDD upgrade. All you need to do is go to the device manager and remove devices before you shutdown the final time. When you come back up it'll re-recognize all the devices, and you're good to go.
  • Well, I did exactly the same you did, only in my case it was a downgrade.

    My first distribution was Slackware 3.0, but after having some problems with it, I moved to Redhat 4.3, and stuck with it to this day (running 7.2 atm). Somewhere along my computer upgrades, I ended up with a spare 4.3 Gb hdd, and I decided to give Slack a try again. I installed it on my box, I decided I liked it, but the school year started, before I could do anything more with it. So it stayed unused for a couple of months.

    BTW, the box that I used for the install was a Dual Celeron on an Abit BP6 board, TNT2 video, SB Live sound, CDROM, 3Com nic, etc.

    Then I decided to upgrade my gateway, from a P100 to something more, and I got a good deal on a P166 box, complete with ATI video (Rage II), no sound, no CDROM, no hdd, nothing else.

    Since I had the 4.3Gb hdd already with Slack on it, I decided to give it a try. I also added a Dlink and a 3Com nic, and a sb16. I was amazed to find out that EVERYTHING worked out of the box, except XFree86, but that was to be expected! I did not touch anything, and everyting was configured, as if Slack had been installed on the p166, and not on a DUAL Celeron.

    So with any luck your box should be useable, with only minor tweaks. You are keeping everything the same (video, sound, nics, etc), and are just changing the CPU and mb. You should run into even fewer problems than with Windows.

  • The problems Windows users usually encounter (it's generally not so plug-and-play as you describe) are from specialized IDE drivers. Resetting your drivers to stock Windows IDE before swapping boards usually fixes that.

    With Linux, you shouldn't have to do a thing, assuming you didn't have a crazy drive controller that was remapping the hard drive in a strange way. (Rare, and unheard of on anything post-486, afaik.)

    At worst, you may have to make a boot disk and run lilo or equivalent on the new machine. Making a boot disk just takes a few seconds, and it may save you a headache - do that before you yank things apart.

    If the thing does topple, it's more likely to be on starting X than anything else. Be sure you know how to disable kdm/gdm/xdm long enough to play with your configuration and you'll be okay.

  • Linux - no problem. (Score:2, Interesting)

    by Daffy Duck ( 17350 )
    I upgraded the motherboard/CPU on my dual-boot box from an Abit P2/300 to a Soyo P3/1000. My Linux installation just recognized the new chipsets properly at the next reboot without any complaints.

    Windows had a shit-fit. Claimed to have found all new EVERYthing - hard disks, sound cards, modems, cd drives, video, mice. Sometimes it found two or three of each kind, and it kept on finding new stuff at every reboot. Ended up having to do a complete reinstall, which was no real hardship since I only use that partition for games. But even with a clean re-install it doesn't seem to be able to shutdown or reboot from Windows anymore.
    • A "Clean Install" with Windoze is not always a "Clean" one. On more than one occasion I have formatted a drive and reinstalled Windows and it has pulled system settings up from the previous install. Sometimes this has disastrous results, but mostly it is just a PITA. It has thought previously installed applications were on the box and listed them in the registry, and has looked to re-establish a mirrored set that I never created on at least one occasion. Despite the DOS format, old files are not deleted, and the drive is not really clean.

      My advice is to clean the drive as much as possible before a reinstall of Windows. This is especially true if you are upgrading/downgrading it from one version to another. If you have SCSI drives, I would suggest going into your controller config and low-level formatting them. If this is impossible, either delete and recreate the partition, or add a "/u" to your DOS format command (or both). This should properly zero out the filesystem on the drive, and eliminate the chances of a buggy reinstall (like you probably have now).

      - Freed
  • You shouldn't have any problems, or very few.

    I did an upgrade from a P200 motherboard with 96 meg of 72pin SIMM memory, to a Celeron 366 with 128meg of SDRAM (since then expanded to 768 meg) - and I think the only problem I encountered was with my ZIP drive not working properly due to a funkiness with the parallel port, but that was due to a bios setting, IIRC.

    Anyhow, you shouldn't have any problems. As you can see, mine was a pretty radical upgrade (waaay different motherboards, chipsets, RAM, etc), but it was really easy.

    Now, you want to know about funky - you should see my hybrid SuSE 6.3/7.2 Personal install/upgrade...
  • You're pretty much home free under linux with a mainboard change. I did it once a while back, moving from a P233 to an Athlon 600. Completely different CPU and chipset.

    linux (Redhat 6.something at the time) booted first time, no problem. I recompiled the kernel later just to update a few things (eg, CPU type). I could probably have done that before taking the box down, so you could count this as one boot if you have a box up all the time and plan it right.

    Windows (95, version 2 with USB support) required something like 3-4 reboots as it tried to find drivers for everything. It eventually booted up OK and actually worked pretty well.

    As plenty others have said, provided you don't have anything "funny", you should be OK. Despite what others say, your X setup should probably still work fine, but you may wish to disable it before taking the box down (eg, by changing default runlevel for redhat or removing the xdm init script in /etc/rc?.d). If you've compiled in some weird IDE controller or whatever, linux will probably still boot, but a stock linux kernel (ie, whatever came with your distribution) is likely to be your safest bet.

  • When your machine boots up, Windows will be confused for a little bit, but will detect all your hardware as new, reboot itself a few times, and then you'll be up and running again.

    Ha! Not under XP it won't... You'll have to call someone at MS to issue a new Product ID to activate your PC.

    • If you are a Corporate user, you are issued a one fits all number that never requires activation. No matter how many upgrades.

      The only user hurt by the new MS leash is the home user that loves hardware upgrades.

      That is, unless he goes to South East Asia and picks up a copy of XP that has been hacked...they are going cheap. Last I heard you could pick up a cracked copy of XP in Hong Kong for under $10 US.
  • The only major thing I can think of is that you eat a little performance for using a stock vendor kernel, as these will be running the lowest common denominator (386 or maybe 586, if the box demands a Pentium) code and not optimized for your architecture. Whether this makes any more than a theoretical difference is completely up to you to decide :-)

    Linux checks all the CPU features (3DNow, MMX) and bugs (FDIV, F00F, HLT) on startup anyway, so no problems there; it should also auto-detect everything fine and deal with it. If you've got a custom kernel, you'll want to reconfigure it to support your new chipset for things like AGP, and also see if you have any bugfix items out for your chipset. Stock kernels have anything and everything on hand to deal, so things should be good with them.
  • I don't know about everyone else, but everytime I do a major hardware upgrade, I find that it's a very good time to do a fresh install of any operating systems I'm using at the time. As long as you meticulously back up anything that's important (game saves, important projects, contents of your home dir, etc.) you should be fine. It'll clean out all of those programs that you downloaded, installed, used only once, and then immediately forgot about, cluttering up your hard drive.
    • If you're like most people who've used linux, you'll probably have a lot of stuff that you installed before you learned the "correct" places to put things, or you'll have old apps that depend upon old libraries. You won't just have the programs that Mandrake currently package, even if you've only put software from older Mandrake CD's on the machine. Deleting everything and having to work out which bits are missing is a pain, particularly weeks after the event.

      Each time I install linux on a different box I spend a bit of time tracking down my favourite apps and loading them on. The home machine, however, has had linux progressively upgraded to avoid that, and there's still a bit of Slackware 2.0 lurking on the drive (which is a couple of drives newer that the original) under the RedHat 7.1 exterior. Doing a fresh install and copying a lot of old stuff over sometimes works, but you'll still spend a bit of time fixing all of the things that are broken.

      The system I use now started on a P60, was cloned to a 486-100, was moved to a K5-133, then to another K5 on a board in better condition, then to a dual celeron 300. Frequent kernel compiles (hardware support gets better all of the time), numerous downloads and four software upgrades from CD later (RedHats 5.2, 6.0, 6.2, 7.1) and I have the current system. None of what I did was difficult, everything gave me a console on boot first try (using the kernel compiled on the previous configuration) and I never lost any data by accident. The slackware to redhat transition did require me to do a fresh install and copy my old files over the top, which worked happily.

      Linux does not have DLL hell - libraries have version numbers. Every now and again it's worth deleting old programs, and moving old libraries out of the way to see if anything still uses them, but a full re-install will waste a lot of time unless you want to use a stock standard system. I have programs from 1996 that I still use every week, that have not had a line of code written since and won't recompile to use new libraries. Just keep the old ones - gtk tends to get upset if it finds old versions, but there's simple ways around that, and most other stuff is well behaved.

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