Topic: Upgrade Hardware

[Damian Marinucci]

I have an SME 5.5 box with a 3GB HDD and I need to upgrade the box.  We have purchased a new box with 30GB HDD and I want to reinstate the system.  My options are :
Backup the old system and restore to the new hard drive.  I have tried that with Backup2workstation and the operation failed.

Use PartitionMagic to copy the disk from the old machine to the new machine.  This would involve pluggin in the old drive into a spare cable on the new machine.

Could anyone comment on the most failsafe way to move my data/configuration and programs to the new box

ANy suggestions most welcome

Damian Marinucci

[Ray Mitchell]

If you only have a 3Gb drive then I assume your data is less than that, so if you use backup to desktop rather than backup2ws, it should work OK as long as the resultant backup file is less than 2GB. Use a non Microsoft browser for better handling of large (2Gb) files ie Netscape or other

Backup2ws should also work OK but there was a problem with restoring all data, you need to put a second entry in the job in order for everything to be restored correctly (search for backup2ws in these forums for the appropriate thread I started).

Note that with any of the backup/restore methods, you will still need to reinstall any rpms/programs that you added to your original server as these are not generally part of the backup.

Cloning the disk from one disk to another should be quite easy and it will include everything that you have installed on the server, the only thing to be aware of is that the original installation loaded appropriate drivers etc for your hardware in the original box. The new box may have different hardware and therefore the most appropriate drivers may not be installed. Having said that I have done similar on a Pentium 166 box and then put the drive in a Celeron 600 and it worked quite OK.

Theoretically, backing up, loading the OS on the new machine and then restoring from the backup is the most reliable way although you need to reinstal all add on rpms as well.

Regards
Ray

[Michael Smith]

Clone the drive over, then before you actually boot the machine from the new hard drive, rerun the install from CD as an "upgrade" or do an actual upgrade to 5.6.  That'll take care of hardware driver issues.  And, if it doesn't work right, who cares, you've still got the original drive and can try another approach.

[Ray Mitchell]

Damian
If you care to read the FAQs here is the exact answer to your question re moving disks and hardware issues.
Regards
Ray

see
http://www.e-smith.org/faq.php3#8q27

Can I install SME Server on one machine and move the disk to another machine?

You should only do this if the machines are identically configured. Many hardware items, most importantly the processor type, are detected at installation time. The installer will choose processor-dependent versions of various important packages, including the kernel. These processor-dependent packages may not run on other processors. If you move the disk to a less capable machine (e.g. from a PIII to a Pentium), the machine is likely to hang just after printing 'freeing cpu memory'. If you move the disk to a more capable machine (e.g. from a Pentium to a PIII), you may not gain all of the performance benefits of the more capable processor. In this case, we recommend that you perform an upgrade (using the same version) to ensure that the correct processor-dependent packages are installed. This will also detect and install the SMP kernel if your newer machine is SMP-capable.

[Damian Marinucci]

Thank you all for your suggestions.  I decided to bite the bullet and use Partition Magic (version to do the job.
I attached the old HDD as a slave in the new box.  Ran partition magic and copied the whole drive to the new HDD.  Rebooted and the system hung at "LI".  I resintalled the OS using the upgrade option.  The system still hung.  I booted from the boot disk successfully and changed the entries in /etc/lilo.conf to reflect the new disk geography.
The only driver change I had to do was change the ethernet drivers, everything else worked fine.

Once all this was done, I rebooted and "Hey Presto" --new system....excellent

Absolutely no loss of data, settings, permissions or extra RPMs installed.

I upgraded ther SME server from a Pentium II 500MHz 3.7G HDD to

AMD 1.3GHz 60G HDD

[Alejandro Lengua]

There is something I don't understand fine in this document al E-Smith FAQ...

The E-Smith upgrade/install process to have fixed the hardware change issues, is valid only for CPU upgrades or also for CPU downgrades.

[Alejandro Lengua]

A customer wants to move its E-Smith hard-disk from a Celeron 900 Mhz CPU
to a 266Mhz. Should this work