swapping hardware

[Jean-Paul Natola]

Jean-Paul Natola wrote:
> I'm currently running FreeBSD 6.2 on a PIII 550  with 384 of ram and 10 gig
> drive-
>
> I got my hands a "new" box it's a PIV 1.8 with 1 gig of ram-
>
> I was wondering if it were possible to take the hard drive out from the
older
> machine ( it's a dell dimension) and put it in the new tower- dell optiplex
>
> I know with older windows OS's 9x it would work fine just maybe have to
> update some drivers, where as with NT 2k XP etc..  it would not.
>
> Will this work in the  BSD world? Or am I asking for more trouble than its
> worth?
>
>
>
>
>
> TIA
>
> J
>
>   

Unless you've done something really *weird* with the kernel, it should 
work just fine. The Windows (2K/NT/XP) problem of booting in new 
hardware is caused by not having the specific IDE / ATA drivers 
installed. The FreeBSD ATA driver is in the kernel and can handle a long 
list of different PATA/SATA controllers. One thing that may change (and 
may cause you some trouble) is the device name (eg from ad0 to ad2), 
depending on the controller / channel you connect the new disk but this 
can easily be fixed in /etc/fstab

You will of course have to reconfigure other changed devices, like sound 
cards, X -if the video card is different -, and  network.
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Believe me , I wish I knew how to do something weird with the kernel- I'm
still wet behind the ears in BSD land.  This machine , believe it or not , I
use a mail filter server-  BSD/CLAM/SA and EXIM-   and I only putty into it-
no X no video nada- but it should* recognize  and install the drivers for the
video and nic? that is my main concern