Upgrading From Intel x86 To Athlon 64

[alan]

On Fri, 1 Oct 2004, Robert L Cochran wrote:

> I'm almost ready to attempt booting my new Athlon 64 3500+ system. This
> is on an MSI K8N Neo2 Platinum motherboard. I've been using Fedora Core
> 2 (x86 version) on my old Intel system and want to move it onto the new
> motherboard and upgrade to Fedora Core 2 (x86_64 version). Has anyone
> done this? Will it work?

Can you do this? Maybe.

Should you do this? No.

Build the system on a new drive with a version built for the AMD64 and 
then move data over as needed.  Otherwise you will not get thefull 
benifits of the AMD64.  (If it will work at all.  Memtest86 reboots 
continually on my AMD64 laptop.)

> The motherboard has 4 SATA connectors, and I'm thinking of getting an
> PATA-to-SATA adapter and using the SATA1 connector for the Fedora Core
> drive. Will using SATA cause problems at installation time? 

Depends on the chipset.

http://linux.yyz.us/sata/sata-status.html has status of various 
sata chipsets.

You may also run into some interesting problems with Yum updates.  The 
AMD64 version will install both i386 packages and x86_64 (i.e. AMD64) 
packages.  This causes yum (and other package managers) to become 
"confused".  Hopefully this will get resolved soon.  up2date handles it 
better, but still gets confused at times.