On Thu, 2005-08-18 at 11:07, Robert Hanson wrote: > greetings, > > it has been a long time and i do not recall all the specifics > > if one loads CentOS Linux on a machine with an PATA IDE or SCSI hard drive > interface then i should be able to interchange that drive on virtually _ANY_ > machine with an PATA IDE or SCSI respectively right?? (ignore physical > connector differences on SCSI) > > i believe the answer(s) to be yes... > > now, what about the newer SATA? will it hold true there as well or are there > enough minor differences in SATA creation and growth where one could run > into an occasional problem? > > the bottom line appears to be that almost _ALL_ relevant hardware drivers > from the past and the present are included in the distribution correct? > > can anyone comment on any major recent "gotchas" or other relevant > situations they experienced in moving drives from machine to machine or ??? I was very surprised that things worked well when moving one IDE drive to another system. It booted up and detected a number of differences in the motherboard chip sets and removed and installed the correct drivers for the new system. Went much smoother than I hoped. The biggest problem you may run into is if you use a different architecture for the CPU. There could be some issues there where loading the correct kernel for the new system prior to moving the drive maybe prudent. As to SATA I don't have as much experience but the thing to look for is the specific chip set used. I have one motherboard that has two SATA controllers on it. The Silicon chip set was recognized and was usable during the install process. The other which I think was an Intel chip set initially did not see any drives I connected to it. I think since then I have found an option in bios that would resolve this problem. The option made it use a shorter time to detect the drive and this was timing out. However I have not made time to go back and test this. So if you have the same SATA chip set between systems I don't see any reason this would not work. If they are different then you need to do some additional checking. Use lspci to get the information on the chip set used.