install on one box move HD to another

**fingers99** · 03-12-2006, 03:30 PM

The background to this is here

I think the CD drive is at fault and think I've found one on ebay.

But, if the worst comes to the worst, is it possible to install on to one machine, pull the hard drive, pop it in the other box and get the autodetection to run again?

I seem to remember someone doing something like this in order to get a new peice of hardware recognised...................

Ideas welcomed. I'll be using Kanotix 2005 4.

**rusty** · 03-12-2006, 03:54 PM

I've done it and as I remember , the trick is to keep the disk on the same place on the ide, so that grub finds /boot.
OTOH, you can edit /boot/grub/menu.list and ADD entries that point to different ide boot sectors . Make sure you leave the old one alone so you can return the drive to the original machine if you need to tweak.

HTH

**fingers99** · 03-12-2006, 07:10 PM

Stranger and stranger: I just tried DSL and it loads fine.

There's no serial port on this box and the only modem I have is an external serial jobie. The box in question will go to a newbie -- she really needs Kde. I wonder what would happen if I copied DSL to the HD on one box, copied over all the "good" stuff from Kanotix and re-burnt the disk?

**nad** · 03-12-2006, 08:01 PM

Might I suggest that you simply install Kanotix to the hard drive and then swap. As long as the physical drive configuration is the same (I assume one hard drive) and the drive is PATA(ide atapi) not SATA, it should just work. A SATA drive could cause issues with unsupported controller firmware.

You can't just copy over the binaries without serious re-engineering issues.

On the other hand, have you tried booting and/or installing with a temporary regular cdrom drive connected to the system? (Open the box and connect a drive to the motherboard).

**fingers99** · 03-12-2006, 11:31 PM

I'll try the first one! The second had not occured, I guess because the CD/DVD drive on this box is always busy, but it's a good idea.

I'm guessing that it'll read DSL and not Kanotix because of the different booting mechanisms. An HD install of DSL fails because it can't get access to the ntfs HD!

And that really leaves me with only the options you suggest.

**nad** · 03-12-2006, 11:59 PM

"I'm guessing that it'll read DSL and not Kanotix because of the different booting mechanisms. An HD install of DSL fails because it can't get access to the ntfs HD!"

DSL and Kanotix, as well as all other GNU/Linux distributions, necessarily use the same "boot mechanism".

Might I suggest that the Kanotix cd that you burnt is not good? The reason may be that the DSL image is considerably smaller than the Kanotix image. You may have achieved a good burn at a higher speed with the DSL image, but, not with the Kanotix image. Try a slower burn speed. I suggest as slow as possible.

What this has to do with an ntfs partition, you may wish to explain, as you will necessarily need to remove any existing partitions and filesystems and repartition your hard drive (unless you are looking to dual boot which is an entirely different animal). The installer will assist you with this.