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Does switching motherboard require a reinstall? (lemmy.world)
submitted 11 months ago by to c/linux@lemmy.ml
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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.

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[–] 9 points 11 months ago* (5 children)

This is actually not even necessary. The systems are similar enough it'll just work. I have recently swapped an SSD from a laptop to a newer model with CachyOS, and that was more of a generational jump in terms of cpu and other hardware.

But CachyOS has a quirk. Linux systems specify which partitions are mounted to which directories in the /etc/fstab file. Unfortunately, the boot partition is specified using a device name and not a UUID. this is problematic when switching an SSD from a system to another as this may very well change device names. It did for me and I then had to rescue boot + chroot to fix it.

The fix, if done before, is trivial: edit the line for /boot in that file to start with UUID= (followed by the actual UUID of the partition) instead of with /dev/nvme0n1p1 or whatever the current device name is. Google should be able to tell you how to find the UUID of your boot partition.

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  • [–] [S] 1 point 11 months ago (2 children)

    Some people keep saying that efi boots are written somewhere in an NVRAM on the motherboard and changing it will require rewriting the partition back on the new mobo. I honestly couldn’t care less if I lost the windows partition (it’s just a “just in case I need windows thing), but it’s the Cachy os install is what I’m worried most about. I’ve had this same install for over a year now and it has a ton of stuff I like. I do have a full dejadup back up on another drive, but still a reinstall would be painful. Here is to hoping it’s not that bad.

    Like you said, they’re extremely similar (I actually made sure of that). Same socket, same brand and same cpus technology and generation.

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  • [–] 2 points 11 months ago* (1 child)

    If that is necessary depends on your BIOS/MoBo. I did have to on mine. But the effort for a normal CachyOS install is t really like 5 minutes: boot into live iso, enter 'cachy-chroot' or whatever the command is, follow instructions on screen. Then just reinstall grub and/or kernel (which regenerates initramfs). There's a wiki entry and pinned posts in discord for this whole thing. Ask in discord if you get stuck, they are incredibly responsive and helpful.

    Once you've done it, you'll notice it's really no big deal. Btw. "Losing" your Linux install is very hard. It's not as fragile as Windows. You can bork things, but they can usually be un-borked as well. The only real way is fully deleting partitions or their contents, which you can't just do accidentally.

    Especially just moving it to a new host can't break it, you just need to get it to boot. Once you know how, it's like 5 minutes. You can take the drive from a 20 year old PC, pop it into a modern system and it'll work fine (assuming the system is semi-updated). Windows has a hard time moving to a different MoBo or platform. Linux doesn't care. Drivers aren't 'installed' like they are in Windows. They are just in the kernel available to be used. Almost everything is detected fresh on every boot, making this incredibly robust. As I said, you might just have to fiddle a bit to get it to boot, once it does, it'll just work fine.

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