Hardware upgrade advice needed

[Scot L. Harris]

On Sun, 2004-12-05 at 10:24, Thomas E. Dukes wrote:
> Hello,
> 
> I would like to move my current system to a new PC.  I'm not sure the best
> way to do this.
> 
> What I was thinking was to move the harddrive to the new computer and let
> fedora recognize and update the new hardware.  Will this work?  The 'newer'
> PC is an IBM NetVista 6792-3MU.
> 

Start by backing up all critical data files and verify that they are
good.

Have moved harddrives between systems a few times and fedora has been
very good at detecting the new hardware and resetting things.  I had one
problem with a system not setting xorg.conf correctly but I was able to
manually set that up.  So this is easy to do and should work just fine. 
Check a similar discussion on the list from a few months ago.  About the
only problem is if you are trying to move to a different processor
type.  If they are similar processor types then you should have no
problem.

> Assuming the above will work, I then like to add an additional harddrive and
> move /home and /var to the new drive.  Can I just format and partition the
> new drive and move the files from the old drive to the new drive?
> 

Yes.  You will need to mount the new partitions with different mount
points as you copy things over then mount them with the real names /var
and /home.  Don't forget to go back and clear out the files under the
/var and /home directories once you are satisfied everything is
working.  Otherwise that space will not be recovered but will be masked
by the new file systems.

> Then, I would also like to increase the swap space on the old drive to
> double the RAM.  Can the swap be resized?

Are you using swap now?  If not you may not really need to mess with
that.  If you do need swap space then just add a new swap area.  You can
have multiple swap areas on the system.  But if you are not using swap
space then don't bother with it.  And if you are trying to add more than
1GB of swap space it is probably wasted drive space.  You would be
better off adding more memory to the system.  Once you start using swap
heavily performance will be heavily impacted.

> 
> Thanks
-- 
Scot L. Harris
webid at cfl.rr.com

If life gives you lemons, make lemonade.