Very Computer

Hi,

I wanted to know if I have a hard disk that works on 486, can
I use the same hard disk and plug it into a pentium 2 system.
The OS is linux. If I do the above will I be able to boot
it up without any modification.

How do I go about copying from a hard disk to a raw hard disk?
Then Can I use the new hard disk and plug it into a pentium PC
and it should boot up??

regards/thanks,

Rav.

I assume this is an IDE hard disk. I know that it should work fine on the
physical side. I had an 128MB IDE hard drive in an 386 and when I upgraded
to a Pentium, I just moved the drive to the new box. It worked fine. If the
drive is smaller than 504MB, then the data should still be there and be
accessible. If you were using a large drive and some sort of driver, the
data may or may not be accessable. I've read a bit in the HOW-TOs about this
and I wouldn't bet the farm on the data being usable. I'd *strongly* suggest
that you make a backup of the data on your current system. The reason that
I'm leary is because I had a 6Mb hard drive that used LBA mode to access.
When I replaced the BIOS (on the existing machine), the MSDOS FAT partitions
were "unreadable". The reason is that the *y new BIOS changed the LBA
mapping algorithm on me! Fortunately, Linux does not use the CHS mapping
that MSDOS does, so I could boot my Linux system. I could then force Linux
to the the "old" CHS mapping. This gave me access to the MSDOS data. Which I
then backed up under Linux. I then repartitioned the hard drive and restored
the data.

John McKown