Moving to another machine without reinstalling

T

timvdl900

Hi!

I just got a small question about upgrading my system but not reinstalling FreeBSD.

I have 8.2 x86 (minimal) installed on an Intel-based HP ProLiant.
HP supports importing the HW RAID to the new controller so I can simply move over my disks.

Now my question is: does FreeBSD install somewhat customized for the system (like Windows does) so I have to recompile/reconfigure anything or can I just move over the OS to the new machine? Of course I understand that the NIC-names may change etc. but I'm more talking about things like drivers and stuff.

The new HP is Opteron-based so it has a totally different architecture.

I assume it's just a default kernel that will run on every system so I have to do nothing but I was wondering what the experts would say ;)

Thanks!
 
If you have compiled a custom kernel, then you may have to do some manual configuration of /boot/loader.conf to load extra drivers. Or switch to the GENERIC kernel before moving the disks.

If you have never compiled a custom kernel, then you probably won't have to do anything, as you will be running GENERIC already. You may need to modify /boot/loader.conf to load some extra drivers, but most likely you won't.

However, since you are moving from a 32-bit processor to a 64-bit one, you should consider doing a backup/reinstall/restore process. That way, you can install the 64-bit version of FreeBSD, and get access to all the goodies that go along with it (the most important one being more than 4 GB of RAM). Be sure to restore only data and not applications, as you will want to install the apps from scratch to make sure you are running the 64-bit versions.
 
Should work, but as phoenix stated, new install may be advisable in such case. First problem upon such change may be change of RAID driver name, which can render slices in /etc/fstab unmountable, but in your case you will be probably moving from one ciss() device to another of same type. Such change may be prepared before moving discs, solved during boot or avoided by using glabel() at all.

I would recommend to boot new machine using live CD/USB media of same FreeBSD version as is actually installed and check dmesg to know which devices FreeBSD will see on it.
 
Thanks for the lovely replies! They give me all the information I need :)

I already planned to install x64 instead of x86 but the DL385 is not willing to boot with 8.2 x64 and 9.0 x64 and hangs at the pcib0/pci0-part of the boot as you can find here for example:
http://lists.freebsd.org/pipermail/freebsd-acpi/2010-January/006257.html

All firmware is up-to-date and the images are fresh from the FreeBSD download mirror...

Therefore I tested x86 which works, and therefore I thought: well, if I can't use x64 then why not just move over the old installation from the DL380?

It's a little offtopic of course but if you can help me to get x64 working properly that would be even better as I have all my custom configuration files stored in a single folder to make life and migration to a fresh installation easy :)
 
Linked message stated, that system is able to boot with 4 GB of memory. Because you will not have more memory available on i386 (without PAE()) at all, why not to try boot amd64 on that machine with all memory modules above 4 GB removed first?
 
ondra_knezour said:
Linked message stated, that system is able to boot with 4 GB of memory. Because you will not have more memory available on i386 (without PAE()) at all, why not to try boot amd64 on that machine with all memory modules above 4 GB removed first?
Click to expand...

My machine has 2GB of RAM installed now (have more available for upgrade but this was just for testing). It seems this issue also appears with <4GB RAM.

The memory is correctly installed according the HP guidelines.
 
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