CentOS - Aug 2005 - using various IDE or SCSI hard drive interfaces with CentOS Linux questions

greetings,

it has been a long time and i do not recall all the specifics

if one loads CentOS Linux on a machine with an PATA IDE or SCSI hard drive
interface then i should be able to interchange that drive on virtually _ANY_
machine with an PATA IDE or SCSI respectively right?? (ignore physical
connector differences on SCSI)

i believe the answer(s) to be yes...

now, what about the newer SATA? will it hold true there as well or are there
enough minor differences in SATA creation and growth where one could run
into an occasional problem?

the bottom line appears to be that almost _ALL_ relevant hardware drivers
from the past and the present are included in the distribution correct?

can anyone comment on any major recent "gotchas" or other relevant
situations they experienced in moving drives from machine to machine or ???

tia and regards,

 - rh

--
Robert Hanson
Abba Communications
http://www.abbacomm.net

On Thu, 2005-08-18 at 11:07, Robert Hanson wrote:
> greetings,
> 
> it has been a long time and i do not recall all the specifics
> 
> if one loads CentOS Linux on a machine with an PATA IDE or SCSI hard drive
> interface then i should be able to interchange that drive on virtually
_ANY_
> machine with an PATA IDE or SCSI respectively right?? (ignore physical
> connector differences on SCSI)
> 
> i believe the answer(s) to be yes...
> 
> now, what about the newer SATA? will it hold true there as well or are
there
> enough minor differences in SATA creation and growth where one could run
> into an occasional problem?
> 
> the bottom line appears to be that almost _ALL_ relevant hardware drivers
> from the past and the present are included in the distribution correct?
> 
> can anyone comment on any major recent "gotchas" or other
relevant
> situations they experienced in moving drives from machine to machine or ???
I was very surprised that things worked well when moving one IDE drive
to another system.  It booted up and detected a number of differences in
the motherboard chip sets and removed and installed the correct drivers
for the new system.  Went much smoother than I hoped.

The biggest problem you may run into is if you use a different
architecture for the CPU.  There could be some issues there where
loading the correct kernel for the new system prior to moving the drive
maybe prudent.

As to SATA I don't have as much experience but the thing to look for is
the specific chip set used.  I have one motherboard that has two SATA
controllers on it.  The Silicon chip set was recognized and was usable
during the install process.  The other which I think was an Intel chip
set initially did not see any drives I connected to it.  I think since
then I have found an option in bios that would resolve this problem. 
The option made it use a shorter time to detect the drive and this was
timing out.  However I have not made time to go back and test this.

So if you have the same SATA chip set between systems I don't see any
reason this would not work.  If they are different then you need to do
some additional checking.

Use lspci to get the information on the chip set used.