Date: Thu, 21 Feb 2002 15:01:37 -0500 (EST) From: Richard Glidden <richard@glidden.org> To: raiden23@netzero.net Cc: freebsd-questions@freebsd.org Subject: Re: Moving an instalation from one machine to another. Message-ID: <200202212001.g1LK1ca50434@zaphod.wox.org> In-Reply-To: <4.2.0.58.20020221124658.009845f0@pop.netzero.net>
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On 21 Feb, Lord Raiden wrote: > Ok, I'm curious of something. I know how to do this the long and > troublesome way, but is there a simple way to take an existing install of > FreeBSD and move it from one machine to another of dissimilar hardware > configurations? Ok, say I've got 2 machines that I'm working > between. Machine A just died. But the HD is fine. Machine B is brand > new, but the hardware is entirely different. AKA, Machine A is a K6-2/500 > on an Asus board, Machine B is a P3-1ghz on an Intel board. A has 1 gig of > ram, B has 2 gigs. Etc. Unless you made significant hardware-specific customizations to the kernel on machine A (like removing unnecessary CPU types, etc) you should be able to just plug the HD from machine A into machine B, boot up, and fix the few things that may break. I recently upgraded a K6-233 to a P3-500 this way. I didn't have to make any changes, since the HD had the same name on the new machine (/dev/da0) and my installed kernel already had support for the i686 CPUs. If there are problems, you can always boot off the CD's and use the emergency shell to mount your drives and fix things that are broken. > Now, what's going to be the easiest way to just move it between machines > and kind of plug and play it right into the second machine without either > installing freebsd from scratch on machine b and then trying to copy over > all needed files and config everything again, or manually updating all of > the settings by hand on the existing install? Doing the fresh install shouldn't be too difficult either. Probably the only files that have changed are under /etc, /var/mail, /home, plus things under /usr/local (/usr/local/etc, and so on). Packages can be reinstalled from the CD's, or rebuilt from ports. You can find out what ports you had installed before by looking in your old /var/db/pkg. Don't forget about your kernel config file under /usr/src/sys... I always forget to back that up when I do a fresh install. I would probably try plugging the old HD into the new machine first. If it doesn't seem to be working, just do a fresh install onto the new HD, plug the old HD in and mount it somewhere, and copy over things that you really need. -- Richard Glidden richard@glidden.org To Unsubscribe: send mail to majordomo@FreeBSD.org with "unsubscribe freebsd-questions" in the body of the message
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