teh_sAbEr Posted August 29, 2004 Report Share Posted August 29, 2004 hi. im planning on building my own PC soon, and since Mandrake here is on a separate hard drive, i decided to just transfer the HD from this PC to the new one. i guess Mandrake can reconfigure to suit the brand new hardware, but is there anything else i should know before attempting this? like hardware incompatibilities, problems w/the kernel (like ive read that the 2.6 kernels can only support up to like 512 MB of RAM, and you have to do something to get it to support more.), things i need to do before ripping the hard drive out of my system such as backup, editing conf files and the like? here are the expected specs of the new PC: Pentium 4 2.4 Ghz 1 GB PC333 DDR RAM (in the form of 2x 512 MB sticks, generic brand...cheaper) ASUS P4P800-VM Motherboard Inno3D GeForce FX5700 128MB LiteON 16x/48x DVD-ROM, and for a monitor, i might go for a CRT, but im really looking forward to finding a good LCD: either the Samsung 172x or an NEC, 17 inches, 16ms response time (for the games...). thanks in advance for the assistance! Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
pmpatrick Posted August 29, 2004 Report Share Posted August 29, 2004 There's a few things to keep in mind. First, where is the hard drive on the ide bus now? If it's on hdc now and you put it on hda in your new box all your fstab and lilo info will be wrong and it won't boot. If your going to change the drive's position on the ide bus in your new build you'll have to edit fstab and lilo.conf to accomodate that new position so the easyiest thing is to keep it in the same position along with any other drives listed in fstab. Essentially, you'll have to recreate the exact ide config in your new box or be prepared to edit fstab and possibly lilo.conf. Re dealing with your new hardware like the motherboard, cpu, pci cards, graphics cards, the easiest thing to do once you have the ide config set right is to rerun the mdk install program by booting off cd-1 and choosing the "Upgrade" option. That will reconfigure all your new hardware and has worked great for me when changing motherboards. This will not update your fstab or lilo.conf if you cahnge your ide config which is the reason for my above comment. Re your question about memory, the standard kernel will only detct and use 894MB of ram. If you have more than that, it's not a big deal; it just won't use it. If you have more than that, after you get everything running per the above, you can install an mdk kernel with high mem support. I think it's called something like "up to 4GB". That's the last thing you should do if it applies as the system will run fine w/o high mem support; it just won't use all your ram. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
papaschtroumpf Posted August 29, 2004 Report Share Posted August 29, 2004 Re dealing with your new hardware like the motherboard, cpu, pci cards, graphics cards, the easiest thing to do once you have the ide config set right is to rerun the mdk install program by booting off cd-1 and choosing the "Upgrade" option. That will reconfigure all your new hardware and has worked great for me when changing motherboards. This will not update your fstab or lilo.conf if you cahnge your ide config which is the reason for my above comment.<{POST_SNAPBACK}> This is excellent advice, after swapping out my motherbaord I had "leftover" stuff from the previous motherboard hanging arounf, in fact my USB settings were wrong. Doing the update takes 2 minutes, doesn't mess your personal settings but forces a proper re-install of the new hardware. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
teh_sAbEr Posted August 29, 2004 Author Report Share Posted August 29, 2004 Right now, my Mandrake drive is set as the slave, with the windows partition as the master. Just in case im not able to re-create the same IDE Setup in the new PC, what changes would i have to make to lilo and fstab? Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
pmpatrick Posted August 29, 2004 Report Share Posted August 29, 2004 Post your current /etc/fstab and /etc/lilo.conf and where you intend to put your hard drive in your new rig(ide1 master(hda), ide2 master(hdc)). From there we can try to create a new fstab and lilo.conf. If your going to be doing this, I'd also recommend that you download and burn a bootable linux live cd like knoppix. Reason for this is that you may need to access the files on your linux hard drive if things get screwed up in fstab or lilo.conf in order to redit these files. I assume this is an ide hard drive; if it's a sata, let me know that as well. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
teh_sAbEr Posted August 30, 2004 Author Report Share Posted August 30, 2004 fstab file: /dev/hdb1 / ext3 defaults 1 1 none /dev/pts devpts mode=0620 0 0 /dev/hdb6 /home ext3 defaults 1 2 none /mnt/cdrom supermount dev=/dev/hdd,fs=auto,--,umask=0,user,iocharset=iso8859-1,dev,codepage=850,suid 0 0 none /mnt/cdrom2 supermount dev=/dev/hdc,fs=ext2,ro,exec,--,umask=0,user,iocharset=iso8859-1,codepage=850 0 0 none /mnt/floppy supermount dev=/dev/fd0,fs=ext2:vfat,--,umask=0,iocharset=iso8859-1,sync,codepage=850 0 0 none /mnt/hd supermount dev=/dev/hda1,fs=ext2:vfat,--,umask=0,iocharset=iso8859-1,codepage=850,kudzu 0 0 /dev/hda2 /mnt/win_d vfat defaults 0 0 none /proc proc defaults 0 0 /dev/hdb5 swap swap defaults 0 0 and my lilo.conf # File generated by DrakX/drakboot # WARNING: do not forget to run lilo after modifying this file boot=/dev/hda default="linux" prompt nowarn timeout=3000 message=/boot/message menu-scheme=wb:bw:wb:bw image=/boot/vmlinuz label="linux" root=/dev/hdb1 initrd=/boot/initrd.img append="devfs=mount resume=/dev/hdb5 splash=silent" vga=788 read-only image=/boot/vmlinuz label="linux-nonfb" root=/dev/hdb1 initrd=/boot/initrd.img append="devfs=mount resume=/dev/hdb5" read-only image=/boot/vmlinuz-2.6.3-7mdk label="263-7" root=/dev/hdb1 initrd=/boot/initrd-2.6.3-7mdk.img append="devfs=mount resume=/dev/hdb5 splash=silent" read-only image=/boot/vmlinuz label="failsafe" root=/dev/hdb1 initrd=/boot/initrd.img append="failsafe resume=/dev/hdb5 devfs=nomount" read-only other=/dev/hda1 label="windows" table=/dev/hda other=/dev/fd0 label="floppy" unsafe intended IDE setup in new PC one HD, my linux driver to be set as master drive. it is an IDE drive. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Gowator Posted August 30, 2004 Report Share Posted August 30, 2004 I'd probably get it all together and then edit the fstab and such through a live CD then edit lilo.conf and chroot to the mounted filesystem and run lilo... this way you sorta test most of it before making any changes....and you can make them incrementally... if you break it then you can always jump back to the liveCD. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
teh_sAbEr Posted August 30, 2004 Author Report Share Posted August 30, 2004 about the Live CDs, Knoppix looks good, but i dont really wanna download 700 MBs again...i remember downloading Mandrake 10 here...took me DAYS with bittorrent. that being said, what about Damn Small Linux? its only 50 MB. would that work fine for just editing a .conf file or two? Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Cannonfodder Posted August 31, 2004 Report Share Posted August 31, 2004 I guess you really don't need to do that.. Before starting, run diskdrake and view your hard drive and partition layout. You will see that your linux partitions match your fstab... e.g. hda Now, after you upgrade your hardware, you can boot off the mandrake install cd and "pretend" to do an install. When you get to the partitioning screen, select custom partitioning. Now you should be able to look at your "new" layout. If your drive is still hda, then you are all set. Otherwise, you need to either redo your IDE cables or update your lilo.conf and fstab files from hda to whatever your new label is (e.g. hdc). If you know how to use vi, you can easily boot off of CD1, and go to the command prompt. There you can vi your lilo.conf and fstab files to update them. Also, note that on booting up, if you go into bios setup, you can usually see how you have your hard drives setup. Make sure that after setting up your new hard ware that the drives all show up in bios. No point in trying to fix linux up if one more drives are not plugged in correctly.. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Sarissi Posted August 31, 2004 Report Share Posted August 31, 2004 As to RAM, I have 1.5 GB DDR333 installed in my system, and I am running the 2.6.x Enterprise Kernel (default). Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
pmpatrick Posted August 31, 2004 Report Share Posted August 31, 2004 Re a good smaller live cd - try slax; it's 182 MB: http://slax.linux-live.org/ As far as editing your fstab and lilo.conf, lets go into a little theory so you understand what's being done. A standard PC mb has two ide ports or channels, a primary(ide1) and a secondary(ide2) and each port can accept two ide devices, a master and a slave. Check your mb documentation carefully when you get it and you will see the primary and secondary ide ports labelled as such on the board layout diagram. This is important because linux names the ide devices by where they are on the ide bus: primary master - hda primary slave - hdb secondary master - hdc secondary slave - hdd Telling me you want the hard drive to be master doesn't identify where the drive is; it can either be hda(primary master) or hdc(primary slave). Take a look at your current configuration as identified in fstab. You currently have two hard drives, a windows drive on hda(primary master) and a linux drive on hdb(primary slave) with two cd drives on the secondary ide channel, hdc and hdd. In your new configuration you want only one hard drive, the linux drive, to be set as master. For the sake of discussion, let's say you put it on primary master whch would change the drive designation in linux to hda. Let's also assume you are going to keep your two cd drives and put them on hdc and hdd, just like your old config. To edit fstab to accommodate this new config, you should delete the references to the hda windows drive since it won't be there and change every reference to hdbx to hdax so it would look like this: /dev/hda1 / ext3 defaults 1 1 none /dev/pts devpts mode=0620 0 0 /dev/hda6 /home ext3 defaults 1 2 none /mnt/cdrom supermount dev=/dev/hdd,fs=auto,--,umask=0,user,iocharset=iso8859-1,dev,codepage=850,suid 0 0 none /mnt/cdrom2 supermount dev=/dev/hdc,fs=ext2,ro,exec,--,umask=0,user,iocharset=iso8859-1,codepage=850 0 0 none /mnt/floppy supermount dev=/dev/fd0,fs=ext2:vfat,--,umask=0,iocharset=iso8859-1,sync,codepage=850 0 0 none /proc proc defaults 0 0 /dev/hda5 swap swap defaults 0 0 One weird thing you've got going on here, is that your windows drive is being supermounted which indicates it's a removable or swappable drive. Don't have time to go over your lilo right now but it's the same deal, change hdbxx to hdaxx. You have to rewrite lilo.conf to the mbr for it to take effect which you won't be able to do beforehand; lilo will just give you an error message because your current ide configuration doesn't correspond to your new configuration. I'll go over how you get around this problem after you install everything in your new box in my next post. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
teh_sAbEr Posted August 31, 2004 Author Report Share Posted August 31, 2004 primary master is what im aiming for here, right now its a primary slave. so let me get this straight, when i edit fstab, i change it to match my new IDE config, HD, Cdroms and all. do i really need to edit lilo ? im not planning a dual boot system here, so is it really necessary? since thats the case, how do i take it off of the windows drive? Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
pmpatrick Posted September 1, 2004 Report Share Posted September 1, 2004 Yes, you will need to edit lilo. Linux can't boot w/o a boot loader and lilo is not properly configured to boot your new system and is not on your linux hd(hdb); it's installed to the mbr of your windows drive, hda. For your new configuration, lilo should look like: # File generated by DrakX/drakboot # WARNING: do not forget to run lilo after modifying this file boot=/dev/hda default="linux" prompt nowarn timeout=3000 message=/boot/message menu-scheme=wb:bw:wb:bw image=/boot/vmlinuz label="linux" root=/dev/hda1 initrd=/boot/initrd.img append="devfs=mount resume=/dev/hda5 splash=silent" vga=788 read-only image=/boot/vmlinuz label="linux-nonfb" root=/dev/hda1 initrd=/boot/initrd.img append="devfs=mount resume=/dev/hda5" read-only image=/boot/vmlinuz-2.6.3-7mdk label="263-7" root=/dev/hda1 initrd=/boot/initrd-2.6.3-7mdk.img append="devfs=mount resume=/dev/hda5 splash=silent" read-only image=/boot/vmlinuz label="failsafe" root=/dev/hda1 initrd=/boot/initrd.img append="failsafe resume=/dev/hda5 devfs=nomount" read-only other=/dev/fd0 label="floppy" unsafe You should make the changes to fstab and lilo.conf just before you take out the hard drive and put it into your new box. It still won't boot because you now have to install lilo to the hd mbr. You do that by booting of the mdk install cd-1 and hit F1 as soon as you see the install screen which will take you to a prompt at which you should type: rescue and hit Enter. That will take you to a rescue menu at which you should select the restore lilo option and your new lilo.conf will be written to the linux hd mbr. Reboot again with install cd in the drive and run an upgrade install to redetect and reconfigure your new hardware and that should be it. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
teh_sAbEr Posted September 2, 2004 Author Report Share Posted September 2, 2004 cool, thanx for the info, ill do that b4 performing the operation. with regards to the 4GB Kernel, i was poking around in RPMdrake, and i typed in the word "kernel" and stumbled across these kernels, some of which were compiled for smp (what is that?), and have support for 4 GB of memory. theres also one kernel there that supports 1 GB of RAM, and has i586 in its label (kernel-i586-up-1GB-2.6.8.1.5mdk1-1mdk) while the SMP ones are (kernel-i686-up-4GB-2.4.25.7mdk1-1mdk). my question is, what is SMP, and is it something i should get? thanx --teh_sAber Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Sarissi Posted September 2, 2004 Report Share Posted September 2, 2004 SMP = Symmetric Multi Processing = 2 CPUs and Shared RAM Quite different from a multi processor board, where each CPU has its own RAM... SMP shares out processing tasks between the 2 CPUs. I run a single CPU. However, with 1.5 GB RAM, I am running the Enterprise kernel, which handles up to 4 GB (max for a 32 bit CPU, BTW). Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
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