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.
No if you haven’t forgot your disk encryption password.
probably not, I move SSDs between computers all the time and linux always just works
very different story for windows installations though 🤮
Highly unlikely. These days, disk space is so cheap that all manner of drivers are provided whether you need them or not. Worst case, you should still be able to boot recovery mode or chroot, as you mentioned.
Just make sure that the disk and boot configuration is the same (uefi, sata, secure boot), else both Windows and Linux may have issues finding their boot files.
Great advice in the comments already, I’ll just recommend that you familiarise yourself with the rescue boot of a live disc of your distro.
If things go weird with thr move you can boot the live in rescue mode, mount your disks and fix fstab, or even redo the initrd . Don’t wait until you need it
Honestly, probably no. You’re switching to something with the same CPU generation and micro architecture, and the boards are by the same manufacturer with the same mobo chipset generation (both 5xx). It should be plug and play.
The only major change I can see the old CPU has an iGPU, while the new one doesn’t, meaning that you won’t be able to use the video port built into your motherboard, only the ports on your GPU. I’m guessing you probably weren’t using that HDMI port in the first place, so it’s probably non-issue.
EDIT: There is a small chance you’ll have to change your fstab depending on how it’s configured; if it’s done by drive UUID, it won’t be a problem.
Highly doubtful since it’s AMD to AMD.
Honestly, even AMD to Intel would probably go mostly fine, considering the monolithic nature of the kernel and it having most drivers built in.
You’d probably want to make sure you have the Intel firmware package installed and make sure to remove configs specific to AMD stuff, like power management configs and kernel parameters, but it would still most likely boot.
For your linux partition you’d probably just need to install new drivers. I’ve popped my boot drive into a bunch of different pcs with no issue.
Your windows partition might be weird, last i heard it assigns the activation to the motherboard serial number or something so you might have to redo the crack or provide your activation code again
Usually, you don’t need to bother much with drivers at all outside of Nvidia GPUs and Broadcom modems since the kernel is monolithic and contains most drivers.
On an ATX motherboard, I think it’s extremely rare for the ethernet chipset to require an out-of-kernel driver.
In general it shouldn’t. You might need to install some new drivers for the new chipset but in itself the system should work. Especially since nowadays kernels are shipped with a lot of stuff and I’m guessing you’re not compiling yours
Regarding messing up with live environment, I don’t remember if GPT is enough for UEFI to load your bootloader or maybe you might need to install something in thereReinstall shouldn’t be required but you’ll likely need to build a new initrd to ensure the boot process has the right drivers.
Ok, that sounds a bit better. I’ll need to learn the building of initrd. Off to searching. Thank you.
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.
On second thought, try to find out which driver your new network card needs and install it before the switch. As long as you have command line and network (USB drivers for keyboard should not be an issue) you can install whatever is missing
Btw, there are two command line browsers that I know of: links and lynx. Copying commands from phone gets tedious fast
It has a realtek Ethernet port that needs r8169 that I read is already baked into the kernel
