[SWLUG] transfering disk to new machine.

[swlug]

Dick Bain wrote:
> 2008/8/21 Neil Jones <neil at nwjones.demon.co.uk>:
>   
>> My trusty work horse of an ancient linux machine is giving me serious
>> trouble it keeps freezing without warning after a few minuites of use.
>> I'd be greatful for any ideas on how to fix this. I have a spare windows
>> machine. Can I just take the disk out of the old machine and put it in
>> the new one and will it just work ? Or is it more complicated than that?
>>     
>
> I would just try that if I were you ;-) You might have problems with
> the graphics card but most stuff should "just work" :D
>
>
>   
What distro? I think one of the newer big name distro's will handle this 
a lot better than something older or more optimised which may not even 
have installed the modules needed to support the other hardware. I'd 
reinstall and copy across the home unless you're using it as a server in 
which case a lot of the good stuff may be outside of ~.

No, I haven't tried it I'm afraid. When my old box died I installed the 
disk in the new one as a secondary drive (PATA in a SATA system) to 
allow access to the files then backed up vital stuff to the new drive.

FWIW.

As for fixing: what machine, how old, any changes in soft/hardware 
recently. Does it fail if booted and not used? Fans still running? Run a 
full memtest (available on most live CD's, eg SUSE, Ubuntu, Fedora, 
Knoppix) and suspect the power supply. If you can boot from a USB stick 
then do that too - if it's stable it rules out a hardware problem.

If it's more than 5 years old my _guess_ is PSU.
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