new motherboard - reinstall ubuntu?

mike pulsation at gmail.com
Mon Aug 22 22:03:55 UTC 2005


On 8/21/05, evansa4 <ulist at gs1.ubuntuforums.org> wrote:
> Yes you will ubuntu will need to update ur new mother board to the
> system but if u leave ur old verson you will think it is still  running
> ur old  mother board

this guy is a moron.

repeat after me: the number one reason linux rocks is because its
monolithic kernel is intelligently designed.  yes, it's monolithic,
but modular.  the PCI probing doesn't tend to hose your machine.  it
CHECKS whether or not it should initialize a driver before it just
goes out and starts writing to IO addresses.  this is one of my BIG
pet peeves with windows.  it just can't take hardware being swapped
out from underneath it.

one of the things to watch out for is what you do with your boot
drive.  if you get a motherboard that has several different PCI ATA
interfaces (say, PATA and SATA) and the bus you attach your drive to
loads its ROM in a differing order than your current setup, your disk
will end up with a different BIOS disk ordinal, causing your
bootloader to freak out, leaving you staring at a LI prompt (or grub,
as it were, though i don't know how grub works -- hell, it may not
have this problem, though i'd be willing to bet it does -- 448 bytes
is not a whole lot of room for fancy code).  even if your bootloader
wasn't able to bootstrap your system, you can always boot with a linux
live cd, mount the drive, modify your bootloader settings, rewrite the
boot sector, and then reboot.  ain't no thang but a chicken wang.

there is always the possibility that your kernel could panic due to
some driver probing where it shouldn't be.  a motherboard is a serious
swapout of hardware, but i have done it numerous times and had no
problems.  hell, i swapped from a system running on a 7200rpm ATA100
drive to a system running on an ultra160 10K attached to an adaptec
19160 with no problems.  after that swap, i had to reinstall win2k,
though.  understand, it's not just swap-and-forget -- swapping from
ATA100 -> ultra160 required me to change a few things with the
bootloader and kernel modules, etc -- but i'm an experienced user and
understand the potential difficulties.  with windows, however, if
there's a problem during a hardware swap, all it has caused me has
been hours of frustration, headache, followed by a reinstall.

the fact is: you are most likely not going to experience any problems.
 even if you do, they will be minor ones -- ones that the more
experienced users can iron out for you in a jiffy. [0]

-mike

[0] jiffy -- pun intended ;)




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