Hi all,
I just bought a new motherboard and I’ll be buying a new CPU, too. The current one is a gigabyte 520i AC AM4 with an AMD Ryzen 7 5700G on it currently. The new one is also gigabyte 550M AM4 and the new processor is Ryzen 7 5800xt. I currently dual boot Cachy OS and windows 11. Each has their own boot partition and I use grub. I’m going to bring everything over from the old mobo except the cpu that will stay on it since it’s going into another pc. Meaning, I’m bringing my SSDs and all that. Will I need to reinstall (please say no lol)? Will it be just plug and play or will I need to fiddle with a live environment to chroot?
Please let me know if you need more info. Thank you in advance.
Great advice in the comments already, I’ll just recommend that you familiarise yourself with the rescue boot of a live disc of your distro.
If things go weird with thr move you can boot the live in rescue mode, mount your disks and fix fstab, or even redo the initrd . Don’t wait until you need it
On second thought, try to find out which driver your new network card needs and install it before the switch. As long as you have command line and network (USB drivers for keyboard should not be an issue) you can install whatever is missing
Btw, there are two command line browsers that I know of: links and lynx. Copying commands from phone gets tedious fast
It has a realtek Ethernet port that needs r8169 that I read is already baked into the kernel
Using DHCP?
Windows stores static network configs in the registry, so with the new mobo’s NIC(s) if you try to set a static IP, Windows will complain that it already exists. Not a biggie as you’d just have to search the registry… if you’re using DHCP no problem.
Highly doubtful since it’s AMD to AMD.
Honestly, even AMD to Intel would probably go mostly fine, considering the monolithic nature of the kernel and it having most drivers built in.
You’d probably want to make sure you have the Intel firmware package installed and make sure to remove configs specific to AMD stuff, like power management configs and kernel parameters, but it would still most likely boot.
I moved my Fedora SSD from an Intel 8th gen laptop to an AMD Zen4 laptop with 0 issue and 0 config. So… you’re probably fine.
I have before move SSDs and had no issues actually, now that you mentioned it. Lol. But this is a different case because I dualboot and I’m technically moving two OSs to a new mobo.
Most distributions, no.
Gentoo, yes.
Gentoo—depends on your CFLAGS, specifically
-march. You may have to change it to a more generic setting and rebuild the system set, plus build additional drivers into your kernel if you have a custom one, before you can safely proceed with the move.In other words, you can get away without reinstalling, but it’s a bit more involved because you may need to undo some customization first.
As I recall - from nearly 20 years ago! - kernel compilations were pretty slender, too. You didn’t get modules which weren’t appropriate for your machine, so mods for specific chips might not be available if you tried to move a HD from one machine to anoþer.
You get whatever drivers you checked off in the config. That might be only what you need for your machine, or you can build some extras, into the kernel or as modules (I’ve done
make modules_installseparate from updating the kernel more than once, because I needed support for a new peripheral). In order to boot the machine you only need a minimal set of drivers: CPU, video, keyboard (+ port), and hard drive. Anything else you can fix later if you need to.My experience in moving a system with a custom kernel from an Athlon64 to a Phenom II more than a decade ago was that the CPU, video, and keyboard were either the same for both or easy to figure out (CPU might have been a bit more difficult if I’d been switching between AMD and Intel, but not much), but I ended up building pretty much every possible hard drive controller driver directly into the kernel until I figured out which one the new board was using. The new system booted without issue, but I had to futz around a bit to get ALSA and other nonessentials back on track.
You should always reinstall when switching motherboard. There’s so many drivers that could possible make a problem. Unless you switch between 2 totally identical motherboards… Then give that a go…
I’ll do everything in my power to not reinstall. I’ve put so much work into this install and I don’t want to redo it all. These two motherboards are essentially identical. Same company, same socket, same everything. I’m only getting pcie 4.0 on the new one and an extra slot for a second NVME. The new cpu is the same. Going from R7 5700G to R7 5800xt
It might but I wouldn’t. Every weird problem in the future is gonna make you wonder if it’s because of that. Now what I would do is get another hard drive, install to it, and copy things over. But basically leave the original one alone. My 2¢
Every weird problem in the future is gonna make you wonder if it’s because of that.
Pretty much what I’ve realised about doing anything weird with my system. I want a peaceful life.
Linux: no, but not necessarily plug-and-play. My daily-driver install is literally pre-configured on a VM and cloned to all of my machines with various motherboards. Nvidia complications aside, a default Linux install will contain nearly every driver you could ever need to get up and running. However, some motherboards do need you to chroot from a live environment and make it “aware” of the existing GRUB bootloader.
Windows: At best, you’ll need to reactivate. More often, it’ll be missing a driver or just not work as well as it did on the old motherboard. It’s better to reinstall Windows.
Will admit that I’m very biased against reinstalling Linux anew except as a last resort since it’s a painstaking days-long process to configure things just right for my picky tastes.
That’s pretty awesome that you can actually take a VM and make it an actual OS. I seriously need to learn how to do that. Also, the only thing I was mostly told is that the new motherboard might not know where the boot partition is, so like you said, I may need to chroot and let it know where it is. I have been told that it is just
sudo pacman -S gruband
sudo grub-mkconfig -o /boot/grub/grub.cfg. And I’m not sure if that is it or if there is something else I may need to run. I have moved an SSD from PC to another before and it was plug-n-play. Like it just booted right away into the system. So not sure. I’ll see what happens.
Saw the followup post, glad to hear its all running well. I created my VM using virt-manager with a raw disk image and UEFI firmware rather than the default qcow2 format with BIOS. I keep the image size down to 32 GB to save time when imaging. Install proceeds as usual, make sure fstab mounts disks by UUID, Debian does by default in my case. When everything is configured,
ddthe raw disk image over to the target disk, do the rituals to make it bootable, and consider configuring new partition UUIDs.Thank you. And man, I so want to do this. Is there a tutorial that you know of that is good? I don’t even know what to search for, to be honest. I do want to build an image and work on it for a little while and then when I feel that it is ready, I want to install it on my pc. So basically, I want to reinstall my Cachy OS system, but I don’t want to start from scratch. I want to build it in a VM, and add all of my apps to it and configure everything until it is a 100% match of my current system. Without any of my personal files because for that, I have a dejadup back up that I’ll just restore to the new install.
In general it shouldn’t. You might need to install some new drivers for the new chipset but in itself the system should work. Especially since nowadays kernels are shipped with a lot of stuff and I’m guessing you’re not compiling yours
Regarding messing up with live environment, I don’t remember if GPT is enough for UEFI to load your bootloader or maybe you might need to install something in thereNo if you haven’t forgot your disk encryption password.
For Bitlocker? Good point, OP would probably need that for the new mobo’s TPM.
Highly unlikely. These days, disk space is so cheap that all manner of drivers are provided whether you need them or not. Worst case, you should still be able to boot recovery mode or chroot, as you mentioned.
Just make sure that the disk and boot configuration is the same (uefi, sata, secure boot), else both Windows and Linux may have issues finding their boot files.
So, I’m guessing I’ll need to figure out the exact paths for both boot partitions for both OSs? That way in case I needed to manually add them I will?
No, just match the settings. There’s really no good way to recover if it’s broken; I’ve never been successful at fixing it and I always end up reinstalling. If the settings match you won’t have to do anything at all.
What do you mean by match the settings? What settings?
As others have said, no for the Linux partition; it’s the same arch, socket type, etc. CachyOS’s kernel probably contains everything you need.
For the Windows partition you might have problems though. Iirc Windows connects licences to motherboards, to prevent disk cloning to circumvent buying licences, so Windows may think you’ve cloned your drive to pirate Windows. I’ve never tried secure boot but I know W11 requires TPM too so if you’ve got secure boot you should look into how to switch to a new motherboard on Windows.
If windows crying about a license is my biggest issue then I think I’m ok with that. I am more worried about efi partitions since I dualboot
massgrave.dev has you covered if windows throws a fit
That and a friend of mine has given me a key a long while ago that I haven’t used yet.
iirc they track the hardware changes and do allow motherboard swaps, but it may be safer to swap cpu first, then motherboard
For your linux partition you’d probably just need to install new drivers. I’ve popped my boot drive into a bunch of different pcs with no issue.
Your windows partition might be weird, last i heard it assigns the activation to the motherboard serial number or something so you might have to redo the crack or provide your activation code again
I’m not worried about the license issue on windows. I actually do have the code saved up because I have always known that it ties it to the mobo.
Usually, you don’t need to bother much with drivers at all outside of Nvidia GPUs and Broadcom modems since the kernel is monolithic and contains most drivers.
On an ATX motherboard, I think it’s extremely rare for the ethernet chipset to require an out-of-kernel driver.
This is true, i didn’t read the part where he’s keeping everything except the motherboard/cpu. I’m used to switching out to random gpus LMAO
Some reviewers on Amazon even mentioned that it worked on Linux just fine.
probably not, I move SSDs between computers all the time and linux always just works
very different story for windows installations though 🤮
I’ve honestly had a lot of luck booting a Windows SSD on different computers.
I love your comment. So reassuring. Lol. I HAVE moved SSDs before where it was only Linux, in this case I’m worried about it because it’s a dualboot
nvidia complicates this, as always
Depending on how grub was installed, you might need to boot a live environment just to tell your new mobo about it. You can skip chrooting if your live media has
efibootmgrand you can figure out how to use it, but if that fails you can always chroot and install grub fresh.Also, it might just work.
Man, if it is as easy as just installing grub, then I’m golden. cachy-chroot will take care of that
Just make sure you put it on the right disk, if you go that route ;)
I’m a paranoid person when it comes to software. Rest assured that it will be the right disk. lol
