[CentOS] using various IDE or SCSI hard drive interfaces with CentOS Linux questions

[Scot L. Harris]

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.