From owner-freebsd-questions@freebsd.org  Tue Aug 30 19:27:44 2016
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Date: Tue, 30 Aug 2016 21:17:57 +0200
From: Polytropon <freebsd@edvax.de>
To: Manish Jain <bourne.identity@hotmail.com>
Cc: "freebsd-questions@freebsd.org" <freebsd-questions@freebsd.org>
Subject: Re: Is it necessary to reinstall OS upon motherboard change?
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On Tue, 30 Aug 2016 19:10:55 +0000, Manish Jain wrote:
> Because of certain problems I am experiencing with my hardware, I am 
> planning to move to another motherboard + CPU. Just out of curiosity, I 
> wished to enquire - is it possible to use an existing FreeBSD 
> installation despite change of MB + CPU ?

Yes. A re-install is recommended (but not exactly _required_) when
moving from a 32 bit platform to a 64 bit platform on x86. A total
re-install is only needed when changing achitectures (for example
if you move from i386 to sparc).



> In the Windows world, that is 
> pretty much impossible, but on FreeBSD the possibilities don't appear 
> that bad to me.

In "Windows" land you also have to consider if you are _allowed_
to re-install on different hardware... ;-)



> (My hard disk and graphics card will remain unaltered).

If you are on amd64, and the new CPU is amd64 as well, no need
to reinstall. In fact, I have a special FreeBSD HDD which I have
already booted on more than 10 totally different systems. :-)




-- 
Polytropon
Magdeburg, Germany
Happy FreeBSD user since 4.0
Andra moi ennepe, Mousa, ...