Changing a motherboard in Linux

[stimpyman77]

Hello all,

I am currently running Suse 9.1 Professional on a PIII-1Ghz box with 768mb of ram, it has been very good to me so far, but here is my dilema. I recently was given an Asus P4B266 wtih 768mb of DDR memory and a P4-1.8ghz 400 Mhz by a buddy of mine. This stuff was still in the box unopened I know its not top of the line but you can't argue with free! I would like to move my Suse install over to the new motherboard and was not sure on how Linux would react to this. In my research I have found that all the hardware for the Asus board is supported by the kernel, so would it be a direct swap? or is there some special procedure for changing a motherboard. Everything would still run on the same interfaces, so no changes there.. I have kept the system pretty clean and would like to avoid the clean reinstall route if possible.. but if I must I will.

Thanks!

Stimpyman77

 

[rahvin]

In my switching of hardware I have noticed zero impact and no precautions necessary. Linux boots just like it did on the other box. The distributions compile their kernels with lowest common denominator in mind, you may have to reconfigure X, and if you have a special kernel installed you should install a second one that is generic x86 for the transition but if you it's a straight install out of the box I doubt you will have an issue just swapping the hard drive into the box and booting.

 

[drag]

If all your hardware is supported by the kernel, then it should be a direct drop.

Depending on how Suse sets up the network, that could be a problem, if your using a onboard nic. If it's configured by eth0 vs by hardware device. Either way worse case you'd have to re-do your networking.

/etc/fstab will control the mount points and is were the kernel knows which /dev/hd## to mount were. If you move from a secondary master ide device to a primary master you'd have to edit that file to reflect the changes, as would the bootloader probably would have to be looked at. But if the positioning of the harddrive isn't going to change any (like it was a primary master in one machine and a primary master in the other) then it shouldn't be a issue.

Other thing to look at is the X configuration (/etc/X11/XF86Config for older and /etc/X11/xorg.conf for newer) may need to be updated to reflect a different video card, if your switching them around. (like if your going from onboard intel to onboard via or NVidia agp or whatever)

I think that would be abou it. Maybe little issues here and there, if you have hardware sensors setup and stuff like that.

But with a little luck it should just be a drop in affair. Should boot up, autodetect the change in hardware and setup all your modules for it.

I've moved from one motherboard to another using debian, and that was cake. Although GUI-based configurations are generally a bit more sensitive due to their complicated manner... You have about a 60% of no issues, and about a 75%-85% of just having it work mostly with just a couple little snags. I don't think that it will just stop working.

 

[stimpyman77]

Thanks guys! You're the best..

Stimpyman77

 

[pitupepito2000]

It should be pretty painless. One thing that you have to be concious is what things change when you change your motherboard. For example if you have mtrr enabled in your kernel, the chipset that you (it's different depending on the motherboard chip) chose in the kernel will have to change. Another thing that you may have to change is if you have integrated sound. Then you will probably will have to change a couple of things in the alsa configuration of the kernel. If you have your nic integrated in your motherboard then you will probably will have to change your network configuration.

Ask the following question to yourself, "What devices did my old motherboard had integrated in it?' and also "What devices does my new motherboard have integrated in it?" Those are things that may need a little bit of configuration since the integrated devices are changing. My sugestion would be to go ahead and change your motherboard, then check if everything is working as before.

Most of the times it's pretty easy to change motherboards.

Good luck,
pitupepito

 

[cmv]

I think you'll be fine if you plug in your old drives into the new system on the same channels. I looked at the P4B266 details on the manufacturer's website and I see it only has PATA (regular IDE) so everything should be straight forward.

On newer systems, sometimes the addition of SATA throws off the drive numbering scheme. For example, the 2nd PATA channel on my Asus K8V SE Deluxe are /dev/hdh and /dev/hdg. If you do happen to have this problem (on bootup kernel can't find root), simple boot up with a recovery disk or CD and edit /etc/fstab to point to the new device name.

In regards to everything else, unless you've compiled your kernel with a CPU setting that won't boot on the new system, you're pretty much okay. Moving around Linux installations is much less painful than Windows installations.

 

[Nothinman]

Even if the drive ordering changes it's easily fixe by booting with single and a new root= directive (or just booting knoppix on the new system) and fixing the fstab paths.

 

[VirtualLarry]

Yeah, Linux is pretty sweet when it comes to just switching hardware platforms out from under it. The biggest issues are whether or not the kernel that is currently installed supports your chipset and IDE controllers, and another is any possible particular kernel boot arguments necessary to workaround some issues, like IRQ routing, APIC support, basically accounting manually for any potential wierd anomolies that your hardware might have. (Via chipsets, mainly.)

I haven't really kept up with recent LKML stuff, are APICs and Via chipsets still an issue anymore?

 

[drag]

I use APIC on my VIA KT400-based motherboard.

Works great. Everything works great. Actually if I am not using APIC the nic will lock up after about 5 minutes of usage. Although I think that it has a lot more to do with the fact that it is a Biostar (read: cheap) motherboard more then it using a via based chipset.

That and the only other major snag is that I needed to upgrade the BIOS to get the stupid thing to support 8x agp. (my card is 8x only, and the BIOS would only go to 4x, so I had to use PCI-mode to keep the stupid thing from locking up. Getting 8x working gave me a 30% boost in performance)

You don't mean ACPI do you? That I don't know about, or care much about with this motherboard.

 

[NewBlackDak]

Our test procedure invloves a Knoppix CD, and knoppix HD install. I can boot any PC in the plant from either, and we're talking from P-133-Dual PIII-PIV 2.8

 

[VirtualLarry]

Well, about the Linux, I'm not sure if it was ACPI or APIC (yes, I know the difference) that was the issue, I thought that it was APIC support on Via chipsets, since their IRQ routing and stuff is a bit different than Intel's.

I too have an (MSI) KT400 mobo, and run it with APIC enabled. (No other choice, really, since Via refuses to release a W2K-compatible IRQ routing miniport, claiming that one isn't necessary, which is kind of a lie.)

Kind of curious though, what video card do you have, that is 8x-only, and not 4x compatible? I've never heard of such a thing. Does that imply that it is only 0.8v-compatible as well, and not 1.5v AGP compatible? I'm running an 8x AGP ATI Radeon 9200 dual-head right now in mine. BIOS only gives an option for 8x ("AUTO"), no switching down to 4x. Kind of annoying since it's well-known that the KT400's AGP 8x support is a tad bit dodgy. I get wierd freezes every few days, although I flashed a new BIOS last week, I'm pray that fixed the issues. (BIOS update readme mentions something about ATI Radeon 9600 AGP cards.)
Edit: moved last paragraph to a post in the proper thread.

 

[drag]

Not sure if the card was 8x-only per say. But I bought this motherboard with the expectation that it would be 8x.

It wouldn't work in AGP mode, so I didn't care for a long time, because the card is overkill for what games I use, but once I started playing around with ut2004 mods I needed the extra performance.

After a little bit of investigation I learned that I needed to specificly setup 8x in the bios, I went their and the stupid thing was grayed out at 4x.

I used the nvidia driver documentation and played around with my different tweaks that I could get on my card, and my motherboard should support all the different modes/options. I played around with setting fast writes and stuff like that. And I tried to unload and then reload the nvidia module and force 4x speed thru module options.

The drivers insisted that I had the card at 8x, the motherboard reported 8x, the documentation and specs said that it supported 8x, old manuals, new online pdf manuals. Tried the agpgart via drivers, tried the propriatory agp driver from nvidia. Everything except the bios said it was running in 8x mode, but once I started X it would lock up. #*^$&$#%^!!!

every freaking time. (had to ssh in from my laptop to reboot it)

I looked at the bios revisions, and they never mentioned jack about anything AGP.

I didn't want to bother with BIOS updates, because:
1. I didn't have a floppy drive in the computer
2. All the floppies I had were ancient and worn out. Lots were ruined from a bad floppy drive I had. And I didn't realise it at the time and mixed all them up.
3. I don't have any dos anything around. No Windows, no dos, no nothing.


I dug up a old floppy drive, plugged it in. That ruined all my remaining disks. (I downloaded a dos image and dd'd it to the floppy from my laptop)

I found a hammer and smashed that floppy drive so I wouldn't forget that it was broken next time.

Then I did a refrigerator magnet format on my last disk, found a new floppy drive (old and full of dust actually), discovered my bios had a option to load a bios from a dos floppy without having to boot into it and run a flash program.

I loaded the new bios, everything worked perfectly since then. Stupid thing.