Hard Drive Transplant

[jMon54]

What would happen if I installed and configured Knoppix 3.6 and then took that hard drive and put it into another computer, with different hardware, as it's only hard drive?

[firebyrd10]

What would happen if I installed and configured Knoppix 3.6 and then took that hard drive and put it into another computer, with different hardware, as it's only hard drive?

Not to much really, I believe that knoppix, even as a debain install does some hardware detection to find what module to load.
At the very most you'd only need to tinker a bit.

[robwelch100]

Assuming the other machine has totally different motherboard and controllers you will most likely find that you will need to reinstall the actuall system but that restore the files you want from a simple backup. Most of hardware detection is not disks and cd roms. Most of it the time spent in detection is spent on motherboard hardware detection and very important. And I'm not talking about a simple thing like sound (if onboard). I'm talking about the controllers for your memory, pci bridge, cpu, bios, etc. You can certainly try to just swap but if it works I think you will have many problems and I'm not talking about the problems that a simple forum post will take care of. This assumes you did a Debian style install. If you did a knoppix style install hardware detection takes place on each bootup. Debian install doesn't redetect the core hardware on each boot.

BACK UP your directories and give it a try.

I have never tried to swap the a drive with linux on it before without reinstalling linux. It doesn't take that much time and it's going to be clean. Keep us posted as to wether it works swapping the dribe without new install. If it does, I guess I will have learned something new about knoppix today.

[stuart_b]

Actually, this is very much what I've done on a series of PCs. I took an image with Ghost, since it turned out to be faster than going through the install. I used the default "Beginner" install, so it does hardware detection.

Anyway, to force it to do full h/w detection, I find I needed to delete several files in /etc before boot--and the system did quite nicely. What I needed to delete was:

/etc/modules
/etc/modules-2.4.27
/etc/modules-2.6.(whatever version)
/etc/X11/XF86Config
/etc/X11/XF86Config-4

Basically, these seem to be where autodetection writes its results, and if they exist it uses the existing versions. All three /etc/modules iterations may not exist, but any that do should be deleted.

[OErjan]

i have done this many times with both Slackware and Debian, never knoppix, should work OK, you might need to edit some /etc files (Xfree, fstab, lilo.conf, grub.lst, modules.conf...) but if lilo/grub is configured rigt it should boot ok. perhaps with some erors but nothing that should crash things (never hapened for me).