I'm not sure about NVIDIA drivers. Otherwise, it depends on what kernel your distro is using; if it's Debian, there's a chance you might have problems, though you could install the backports kernel, which I do on my Thinkpad E16.
this post was submitted on 29 Jan 2025
25 points (90.3% liked)
Linux
49430 readers
505 users here now
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Linux is a family of open source Unix-like operating systems based on the Linux kernel, an operating system kernel first released on September 17, 1991 by Linus Torvalds. Linux is typically packaged in a Linux distribution (or distro for short).
Distributions include the Linux kernel and supporting system software and libraries, many of which are provided by the GNU Project. Many Linux distributions use the word "Linux" in their name, but the Free Software Foundation uses the name GNU/Linux to emphasize the importance of GNU software, causing some controversy.
Rules
- Posts must be relevant to operating systems running the Linux kernel. GNU/Linux or otherwise.
- No misinformation
- No NSFW content
- No hate speech, bigotry, etc
Related Communities
Community icon by Alpár-Etele Méder, licensed under CC BY 3.0
founded 5 years ago
MODERATORS
Are you installing the system on this hard drives? If not and they're just attachments for additional storage, then you should have no problem.
If there's an OS installed on them that you want the data from and you didn't separate your /home folder, you'll have to copy that data to another drive, remove/replace the OS installation, and then copy the data back.
Others say that I can drop my is drive into a new PC. I'll back it up and try that, if not I'll just do a fresh install.
No, it should work fine, but a backup is always a good idea.
It's not like Windows where it has to install a bunch of new drivers via 7 reboots. It just sees the new hardware and uses the correct drivers.
I would mostly agree with the others that you will have no issues booting, HOWEVER...that doesn't mean you won't run into some problems because we don't know your system.
Here's where you might run into problems:
-
Audio hardware: make sure whatever chipset you're moving over to is fully supported with kernel drivers, and disable any audio customizations you may have made to pipewire or pulseaudio. You may run into input confusion, hardware level/volume problems, and mixing issues, so it's best to revert to whatever defaults you may have on hand before booting.
-
Network: same thing as above, but also make sure you don't have network settings tied to a specific PCI device in your configs.
-
Disable docker and VMs from systemd before first boot: if you have any stateful containers that might be thrown into disarray by bad boots (IF they happen), you may have to spend a lot of time cleaning up. Much safer to just let them not start until you're satisfied that everything is ok, then just enable the services again.
-
Remove any Nvidia settings tied to a specific device or display. This is probably going to be the most common thing people run into. Wiping and reinstalling the Nvidia stack should fix it though if you run into issues.
All of that said, the first thing you can do to suss out IF you may have any issues with your hardware is boot a liveusb on your new build first and making sure everything works. If it does, great. If it doesn't, you know what to expect. If then booting your old drives shows problems, you've also already proven that shouldn't be the case because a liveusb worked fine, and you know where to start attacking problems.
Good luck!
Thanks for the info. I'll make sure to double check all that before. I have another question. If I edited fstab to add mounting hard drives on boot. Will I have to redo that when I hook my drive up to a new mobo? Or will the drive UUIDs and mount paths be the same?
It depends. You should read up on it, but if you mount via UUID, /dev, or otherwise "out of your control" naming, you may have issues.
Best to check out liveusb to see what's happening.
Have done this several times. I have never had to do anything else. I just swap em and boot.
I'd expect it to work maybe 80% chance.
I feel ike I've had issues with grub doing that type of swap- I can't remember the specifics, maybe hd0,x became swapped with hd1,x Or maybe i did something daft like futz with the partitions.
(assuming mint does use grub) maybe be prepared with either a grub shell cheatsheet, or just a live usb to chroot from so you can reconfigure grub.
Or just try swapping the ports over.
Only other issues I've had is maybe going non-uefi to uefi, and with things like "secure boot". You can just trial and error the few combinations if you dont know.
Maybe note down any current mobo bios settings especially re: disks and boot.
edit - i fogot cpu microcode is vendor specific - you might need to swap that or at least remove the old microcode before swapping it could be irrelevant https://wiki.debian.org/Microcode
I've done this with Debian before, and it works fine. Linux usually mounts the root filesystem based on its UUID, so it doesn't matter if changing the motherboard caused a change from /dev/sda to /dev/sdb .
If you use the proprietary Nvidia driver, make sure to update it to a version that supports the new video card. If you use the open source Nvidia driver, you should be fine even if it's old, because it will at least support starting up in an unaccelerated mode.
i use mint and i upgraded my cpu from i5-9600kf to 7800x3d, and ofc mobo and ram too, and i had to reinstall. the system booted up but everything was very stuttery and slow
I did something similar recently and found it was an easy drop-in situation... so you'll likely be okay.
I upgraded my CPU on my debian server. Went from i5-4690K and RX 480 to just an i5-12600K.
I could see a potential issue if the WiFi card is different and you're not hard wired.