Re: upgrading hardware

[Bob <spam@homeurl.co.uk>]

Jon L Miller wrote:
> I’m currently using Debian 4.0 and I would like to know if I’m going 
> to run into any gotchas if I change the main board from a MSI w/ a 
> single P4 CPU to a Core2 Duo CPU on a gigabyte main board?

I tell you what I do in a situation like this, just use dd to mirror the 
drive onto a spare and try it.

It should be OK, and as Andrei said reconfiguring thing to use partition 
labels will help.

This is the way I do it.

First Label all partitions for their mount point so label /home as 
p_home, label / as p_root, label /var as p_var etc..
Read in /etc/fstab to identify partitions

with ext[23] partitions use
# e2label /dev/hdXX -L label
With xfs
# xfs_admin /dev/hdXX -L label
with jfs
# jfs_tune /dev/hdXX -L label

with swap use
# swapoff -av
# mkswap -L p_swap /dev/hdXX
# swapon /dev/hdXX

Now that you have labels on all your partitions, change the two files 
like this
/boot/grub/menu.lst

from
kernel /boot/vmlinuz-2.6.18-6-k7 root=/dev/hda2 ro
to
kernel /boot/vmlinuz-2.6.18-6-k7 root=LABEL=p_root ro

And to change the default entry
# kopt=root=LABEL=p_root ro

Now edit /etc/fstab (just one example, the rest are similar):
from
/dev/hda3 /var ext3 defaults 0 2
to
LABEL=p_var /var ext3 defaults 0 2

Reboot and good luck