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View Full Version : How is this possible?



waloshin
February 22nd, 2010, 09:32 PM
I had Fedora 11 installed on a computer, the power supply died so I swaped the harddrive in a different computer and Fedora booted up like nothing happened.

Post Monkeh
February 22nd, 2010, 09:37 PM
I had Fedora 11 installed on a computer, the power supply died so I swaped the harddrive in a different computer and Fedora booted up like nothing happened.

magic

waloshin
February 22nd, 2010, 09:40 PM
magic

Well I thought that when you swap a harddrive from one system to another that it usually has problems with hardware?

gn2
February 22nd, 2010, 09:43 PM
Sometimes Windows can do that too.
My Athlon XP2100 died and got replaced by a Core 2 Duo set up.
Xp just booted straight to the desktop.

NoaHall
February 22nd, 2010, 09:43 PM
Well I thought that when you swap a harddrive from one system to another that it usually has problems with hardware?

No. This rarely happens on GNU/Linux, unless you have compiled the kernel yourself.

mcduck
February 22nd, 2010, 09:44 PM
Most Linux distributions include pretty much every possible driver so they are able to survive changing to different hardware. The kernel just checks what hardware you have and loads the correct drivers. (If you had some highly-tuned Gentoo setup, for example, then you sure wouldn't be able to boot it on any other system than the one where it was built to run.)

For Windows such thing would be a bigger problem because it requires users to install large portion of drivers manually, and then just assumes that you'll have those devices around on every boot. Change the hardware and it'll try to load drivers for hardware that isn't there, and at the same time fails to find drivers for the hardware you actually have. :D

..and OSX of course doesn't like booting on anything else than the few setups it was built for.

Tristam Green
February 22nd, 2010, 09:50 PM
magic

You mean magic blue smoke, right??? (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Magic_smoke)

Post Monkeh
February 22nd, 2010, 09:51 PM
Sometimes Windows can do that too.
My Athlon XP2100 died and got replaced by a Core 2 Duo set up.
Xp just booted straight to the desktop.

i'm surprised, i thought as soon as you changed your mobo you needed to reinstall xp, i did anyway.

Tristam Green
February 22nd, 2010, 09:52 PM
i'm surprised, i thought as soon as you changed your mobo you needed to reinstall xp, i did anyway.

Nope, just need to reactivate upon a massive hardware change.

Post Monkeh
February 22nd, 2010, 09:55 PM
You mean magic blue smoke, right??? (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Magic_smoke)

when i saw magic and smoke in the same sentence, i was expecting something totally different there.

forrestcupp
February 22nd, 2010, 09:56 PM
No. This rarely happens on GNU/Linux, unless you have compiled the kernel yourself.

Try swapping from a computer using nvidia binaries to a computer with an ATI card. ;)

Post Monkeh
February 22nd, 2010, 10:03 PM
Nope, just need to reactivate upon a massive hardware change.

can't remember, it was a couple of years ago now but xp didn't like something when i got a new mobo/memory/processor & graphics card and it bsod'ed as soon as it tried to boot, i was nearly sure i read it was a motherboard change that prompted a reinstall, it must have been something else.