How-to safely upgrade major hardware

The Fighting Falcon · n00b Joined: 04 Jan 2006 Posts: 3

Hi All,

I am about to change some major components in my computer and I am wondering if and how to proceed with the upgrade and keep my gentoo working.

I have now:
Processor: AMD Athlon (Thunderbird) 1333 MHz
Motherboard: Asus A7V133 (Via KT133a chipset)
Memory: 640 MB PC133 SDRAM

Will get:
Processor: AMD Athlon64 3000+
Motherboard: Asus A8V Deluxe (Via K8T800 Pro chipset)
Memory: 2 GB DDR400

I am running x86 stable and have GCC4.1 with kernel 2.6.5-gentoo-r1

What is the best upgrade path?
Can I just put the new hardware in, turn my computer on, boot into Gentoo and hope for the best?
Should I move my system over to AMD64?
Is that 'necessary'?
--
Greetings
Hans
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ecosta · Guru Joined: 09 May 2003 Posts: 477 Location: Brussels,BE

I would keep the system in 32bit, I don't think you can just recompile the box to 64bit, you'll just run into too many probs.

Then I'd configure a new kernel that takes in acount all the changes. Once done, do the swap and boot on the new kernel.

I can't imagine you'll have much trouble.

-Ed
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opentaka · l33t Joined: 18 Feb 2005 Posts: 840 Location: Japan

I prefer 64bit, I love it

You can't just recompile to everything to upgrade to x86_64 of gentoo( you need a fresh install) but you can use your 32bit ones without problems unless you have right drivers enabled for the motherboard in the kernel.

proceed to AMD64 FAQ for more

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mikegpitt · Advocate Joined: 22 May 2004 Posts: 3224

This situation is slightly different than yours, but my first gentoo machine was an Athlon. One day the motherboard on the machine blew up (literally, there was a big char mark!). Anyways, luckly I also had a P4 around that I was using for a different purpose. I ended up taking the harddrive out of the old machine and putting it in the new machine, and guess what? It worked! Now mind you, since it was optimized it ran a bit slow on the P4.

I did end up reinstalling from scratch, but I'm betting that I would have been able to recompile my system and everything would have been fine.

jrperiod · Posted: Mon Jul 31, 2006 3:55 pm Post subject:

OK, so im in a similar situation.

Im changing the Mobo and processor in my Gentoo file server and from what Ive read on this forum, all I have to do is boot to the live cd and recompile my kernel with the new hardware and change my make.conf and run an emerge -e world

Is this correct?

Nicias · Guru Joined: 06 Dec 2005 Posts: 446

If you change CHOST, it can make life difficult. It is doable, you just have to be careful about the order in which you recompile things. there are several threads about changing CHOST. I don't know about changing profiles.

nixnut · Posted: Mon Jul 31, 2006 6:02 pm Post subject:

Moved from Installing Gentoo to Duplicate Threads.
See here
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