[lug] MB Replacement

[Nate Duehr]

Ben wrote:
> I bet you can avoid doing a fresh install. If you cannot boot with the
> original hard drive on the new mb, get to a shell prompt -- either with
> the ubuntu install disk or knoppix, or something. Mount your hard drive.
>>From there you can reinstall grub (or lilo) on the mbr. Most likely
> that'll do it. You might need to boot with a generic (instead of custom)
> kernel. If you don't have a generic kernel installed, install one (I think
> you can chroot to the your mounted hard drive from your root shell and if
> the network is up, use apt-get... ).

>>> First advice:  JuPut the old disk in another Linux machine, back it
>>> up
>>> thoroughly, and then give it a whirl.

Re-pointing out my original comment -- it just might work, and I have 
seen it work.

And the second "more dangerous" scenario of some sort of odd data 
corruption problem is very rare these days... it was mostly there in my 
list for "completeness".

If other people are successfully running your new motherboard on Linux 
systems, that would take that worry away.

The trick here (as with all good backup and mountain flying plans...) is 
to always leave yourself a way out.

If the thing looks like it's working correctly, and you have backups - 
you have a way back to where you were today.

Then if you continue whatever backup plan you had before the outage, you 
would have good usable backups of the new system's data also.

After all of that... it's all about how much time it takes.  Certainly 
if you have backups -- just try it.  No harm trying.  And that's 
certainly the fastest way to being back up and online, if it works.  And 
it doesn't add significant time to the process... it's not difficult to 
attempt... and you're sitting there at the machine ready to do the 
re-load if it doesn't work.

As someone mentioned, then you can choose whether or not to muck around 
with trying to make it work or re-loading from scratch and restoring 
backups.

It's a judgement call as to which one you think will yield a working 
machine the fastest at that point.

Nate