Hi everyone, I am planning on building a new PC. The only things I’m planning on transferring from my old build are my hard drives. Will I have any problem putting my OS drive with Linux mint right into a whole new PC? My other question is if I use my current Linux OS drive do I have to remove the old GPU and CPU drivers? I’m sticking with an nvidia card but I will be switching from Intel to AMD. I know in Windows you have to use software to fully remove GPU drivers before using a new one.
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.
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.