abalagtas

ok...I've got my computer physically dual booted. Basically, I've cannabilized some old systems to keep from throwin thing out.

Here is what I got:

10g HD w/XP Home w/a 80g HD

80g HD w/Linux


The 10g XP drive is in the 1st position on the bus and the 80g Linux drive is in 2nd. I have the jumpers connected to a switch. When the switch is open the XP drive boots. When the switch is closed, it shorts the master jumper on the Linux drive and the slave jumpers on XP and the Linux drive boots. The 80g XP drive is on the 2nd bus.

I would like to seperate the drives. Which would be the easiest to move to a new box? XP or Linux. I'm thinking it would be cheaper/easier to move the Linux drives. Can I just build a new box and plop in the drives?

tulsa_97SR5

It would probably depend on how similar the hardware in the new box is, since the kernel & modules in linux are setup to use your current hardware. If you build a new box & install linux on a new HD, and move your current linux drive over as a secondary drive you can mount it up no problem & access all your current files. What distro do you run?

Churnd

I know for a fact XP won't work, because of chipset issues.

However, I'm not sure about Linux. I don't know if it relies on chipset info. Common sense says it would. However, I agree with tulsa... install Linux on the new then move the old over and read the files from it. However, this could also be done with XP. If you aren't getting a new drive, I'd just back up whichever drive has the smallest number of files and transfer that one over.

mike_d

the stupid piracy prevention of XP will make it extremely hard to move to another computer - but there may be a way around it, i don't know as i never use windows.

linux will be most likely trivial to move to another system. at least i never had any issues moving linux installations around.

midiwall

Ahhh... but there's a simple trick to make moving an XP installation painfully easy.

When you try to move an 2000/XP system onto a new motherboard, Windows getting PO'd about the IDE and host chipsets being different and refuses to boot. So, the gest of what you want to do is to swap out the specific IDE drivers to "Standard", then shutdown Windows, pull the drive, move it to the new motherboard and boot.

In steps...

• Finish what you're doing on the machine and wave goodbye to the old motherboard.
• Open control panel
• Double click System
• Click Hardware
• Click Device Manager
• Click IDE controllers
• Click Primary IDE
• Click Driver/Update Driver/Install from list/Next
• Click Don't Search/Next
• Click Standard IDE controller/Next
• ...Do the same for the Secondary IDE channel
• Shutdown Windows, do NOT let it reboot on the old motherboard
• Move the drive to the new MB
• Boot...

Windows should come up and go through it's hardware detection. You might need an install CD for it to pull drivers from, but usually not.

The _ideal_ thing is to wipe the drive and reinstall your world on a new machine. I generally REFUSE to do that and as such I've used this a number of times in the last couple of years and I haven't had a problem yet.

Churnd

Awesome! I have that saved for future references. Thanks!