Putting my HD In a new machine

In a message on Sun, 12 Jun 2005 18:08:55 -0400, wrote :

Is it a SCSI or IDE or SATA disk?

If IDE, you should just be able to install the old disk in the new machine and things should just work.

If SCSI, you need to update the initrd to include the driver module for the new machine's SCSI controller, if it is different.

Ditto for a SATA disk.

Updating the initrd is fairly easy. *Before* you shutdown the old machine, update youretc-modules.conf to include an *additional* 'alias scsihostadapter ...' line with the name of the new machine's SCSI controller (don't remove the *existing* 'alias scsihostadapter ...' line!).

Note: if the new machine uses the *same* SCSI-SATA driver module, you don't need to mess with modules.conf and can skip to moving the disk right now.

Then re-run mkinitrd with the -f option:

mkinitrd -fboot-initrd-`uname r`.img `uname -r`

If you are using LILO, re-install it:

lilo -v

Now you can shutdown and move the disk to the new machine. On the first boot it will complain about a 'missing' SCSI controller (your old machine's SCSI or SATA controller). If you put the 'right' thing inetc-modules.conf, it will also load the module for the new SCSI-SATA controller and boot up normally. Once you are *sure* you don't need boot with the old machine, you can editetc-modules.conf and remove the old machine SCSI controller and re-build the initrd again.

If you are using a hardware RAID controller, you should move the RAID controller with the disk(s).

Oh, if you have things like a Ethernet controller, etc. you'll need to update the drivers loaded (-etc-modules.conf), but you can do this *after* the machine boots (probably should boot single user). For a *server* you probably don't have a sound card and are probably not using the X server, but if you are, you'll need to update these driver modules as well. (Kudzu might do all of this automagically.)