Trying to reconfigure F9 to new computer hardware... firstboot?

[Les Mikesell]

Mike wrote:
> Dan Thurman <dant <at> cdkkt.com> writes:
> 
>>
>> What happened was that I spent a lot of time configuring
>> computer "A", and rsync'd the root filesystem onto disk
>> at computer "B".  I then rsync'd from hard disk to computer
>> "C" and everything was fine except that the hardware is
>> clearly different.
> 
> I am not sure that copying the root partition from one machine to another
> is a good way to install Linux.
> 
> Was there some special reason not to use one of the normal install methods
> from the DVD or Live CD? 

The usual reason for doing this is that you have done extensive 
configuration and/or installed local or 3rd party software that would 
take a lot of time to repeat.  Or you just want to know how things will 
work out if you have to restore from your backups on a new machine.  Or 
maybe your computer died and you really do have to restore from backups now.

Or, you installed under VMware with a different host OS to test 
usability and now that you know everything works, you want to migrate 
your working setup to real hardware.

It would be _really_ nice if the installer could be re-run in this 
situation, offering to fix only the things that needed to be fixed 
(re-detect hardware, build a working initrd, install grub, fix your 
modprobe.conf and check your fstab and network setup).  You can do this 
gunk by hand, but it means you have to know as much as anaconda (which 
doesn't seem to be all that well documented...) about hardware and 
drivers.  You can sort-of get most of the effect by making /boot a 
separate partition, doing a basic install on the new hardware, then 
removing everything except /boot and copying in your old stuff, but that 
seems unnecessarily cumbersome.

-- 
   Les Mikesell
     lesmikesell at gmail.com