[nflug] Swap harddrives

[Richard Hubbard]

Although a backup won't hurt, at ITT we swap harddrives all the time.  
We have removable drive bays, and put normal ide/sata hard drives in a 
clamshell.  when a student goes to a lab, he/she will pull out the 
school harddrive, and put in her harddrive.  when the lab is over, she 
will swap them back.  Hardware _could_ be an issue, but i've seen 
radically different hardware configurations boot without much of a hitch.

one thing to note, on bootup, you will see the kudzu service telling you 
about new hardware.  Accept the changes, and you will be home free.

This is my own big issue with Windows. MS has put in traps what will 
blue screen your computer if more than a certain percentage of hardware 
changes have been made.  Which means windows 2003 server will blow up 
when installed on a Dell in one lab, then the harddrive is taken to 
another lab.

That's why the program chair for it will be offering ide clamshells for 
anyone in the nflug, in case you want to bring a hard drive in, instead 
of a whole computer.

David W. Aquilina wrote:
> On Tue, Jun 27, 2006 at 11:09:40PM -0400, Dennis Ruzeski wrote:
>   
>> It'll should come up w/ no prob. I'd check the loaded modules after the
>> first boot and make sure all the hardware is ok..
>>     
>
> Not necessarily. Fedora uses an initial ramdisk image (contained in /boot/initrd-`uname -r`.img) to boot. If you disassemble the initrd, you'll find that it contains the drivers you need to boot, such as for the disk controller. 
>
> If the new system uses the same driver as the old, you shouldn't have any problems. However, if it uses a different driver it won't be able to boot on the new system .
>
> Prior to moving the disk to the new system, you should figure out what controller each system has. If they differ, create a new initrd with the right driver before switching the disk into the new system. For example, if the new system uses an nVidia SATA controller, you would want to run: 
>
> mkinitrd --preload=sata_nv -f /boot/initrd-`uname -r`.img `uname -r`
>
> NOTE: this will overwrite your existing initial ramdisk image. I suggest you make a backup of it first. 
>
> Good luck.  
>
>   

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