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.
probably not, I move SSDs between computers all the time and linux always just works
very different story for windows installations though 🤮
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I’ve honestly had a lot of luck booting a Windows SSD on different computers.
I love your comment. So reassuring. Lol. I HAVE moved SSDs before where it was only Linux, in this case I’m worried about it because it’s a dualboot
It might but I wouldn’t. Every weird problem in the future is gonna make you wonder if it’s because of that. Now what I would do is get another hard drive, install to it, and copy things over. But basically leave the original one alone. My 2¢
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.
I’ve never used the iGPU on my old CPU. I just never needed it. And yes, I purposefully bought the same CPU generation and the same socket and manufacturer mobo, JUST to avoid this type of issue. Also, I don’t see the need to spend double the money if AM4 and 5th Gen AMD has been working fantastically for me.
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.
This is the part that worries me the most. I don’t know much about this whole UUID stuff (I’ll learn of course). I HAVE moved ssds between machines before without an issue, but that was all Linux. This time it’s a dualboot
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
Yup. I’m familiar with that already. CachyOS has a great documentation about it. Appreciate you :)
As others have said, no for the Linux partition; it’s the same arch, socket type, etc. CachyOS’s kernel probably contains everything you need.
For the Windows partition you might have problems though. Iirc Windows connects licences to motherboards, to prevent disk cloning to circumvent buying licences, so Windows may think you’ve cloned your drive to pirate Windows. I’ve never tried secure boot but I know W11 requires TPM too so if you’ve got secure boot you should look into how to switch to a new motherboard on Windows.
If windows crying about a license is my biggest issue then I think I’m ok with that. I am more worried about efi partitions since I dualboot
massgrave.dev has you covered if windows throws a fit
That and a friend of mine has given me a key a long while ago that I haven’t used yet.
iirc they track the hardware changes and do allow motherboard swaps, but it may be safer to swap cpu first, then motherboard
Linux: no, but not necessarily plug-and-play. My daily-driver install is literally pre-configured on a VM and cloned to all of my machines with various motherboards. Nvidia complications aside, a default Linux install will contain nearly every driver you could ever need to get up and running. However, some motherboards do need you to chroot from a live environment and make it “aware” of the existing GRUB bootloader.
Windows: At best, you’ll need to reactivate. More often, it’ll be missing a driver or just not work as well as it did on the old motherboard. It’s better to reinstall Windows.
Will admit that I’m very biased against reinstalling Linux anew except as a last resort since it’s a painstaking days-long process to configure things just right for my picky tastes.
That’s pretty awesome that you can actually take a VM and make it an actual OS. I seriously need to learn how to do that. Also, the only thing I was mostly told is that the new motherboard might not know where the boot partition is, so like you said, I may need to chroot and let it know where it is. I have been told that it is just
sudo pacman -S gruband
sudo grub-mkconfig -o /boot/grub/grub.cfg. And I’m not sure if that is it or if there is something else I may need to run. I have moved an SSD from PC to another before and it was plug-n-play. Like it just booted right away into the system. So not sure. I’ll see what happens.
Saw the followup post, glad to hear its all running well. I created my VM using virt-manager with a raw disk image and UEFI firmware rather than the default qcow2 format with BIOS. I keep the image size down to 32 GB to save time when imaging. Install proceeds as usual, make sure fstab mounts disks by UUID, Debian does by default in my case. When everything is configured,
ddthe raw disk image over to the target disk, do the rituals to make it bootable, and consider configuring new partition UUIDs.Thank you. And man, I so want to do this. Is there a tutorial that you know of that is good? I don’t even know what to search for, to be honest. I do want to build an image and work on it for a little while and then when I feel that it is ready, I want to install it on my pc. So basically, I want to reinstall my Cachy OS system, but I don’t want to start from scratch. I want to build it in a VM, and add all of my apps to it and configure everything until it is a 100% match of my current system. Without any of my personal files because for that, I have a dejadup back up that I’ll just restore to the new install.
You should always reinstall when switching motherboard. There’s so many drivers that could possible make a problem. Unless you switch between 2 totally identical motherboards… Then give that a go…
I’ll do everything in my power to not reinstall. I’ve put so much work into this install and I don’t want to redo it all. These two motherboards are essentially identical. Same company, same socket, same everything. I’m only getting pcie 4.0 on the new one and an extra slot for a second NVME. The new cpu is the same. Going from R7 5700G to R7 5800xt
No if you haven’t forgot your disk encryption password.
I don’t encrypt.
Depending on how grub was installed, you might need to boot a live environment just to tell your new mobo about it. You can skip chrooting if your live media has
efibootmgrand you can figure out how to use it, but if that fails you can always chroot and install grub fresh.Also, it might just work.
Man, if it is as easy as just installing grub, then I’m golden. cachy-chroot will take care of that
Just make sure you put it on the right disk, if you go that route ;)
I’m a paranoid person when it comes to software. Rest assured that it will be the right disk. lol
