# Is there an easy way around this?

## johnisevil

About a month ago, my motherboard passed on to the other side.  Well, it still works but sparingly.  The system is unusable for anything more than half an hour at a time.  There are a few bulging capacitors around the CPU socket and I'm guessing that these coincide with severe system instability.  Nothing on the Linux level, but my computer randomly powers off.  Now on to my problem:

My system (like any Gentoo system) is configured around my hardware.  The main issue being chipset support.  The current setup uses an Nvidia chipset.  If I replace said crapped out motherboard with one that uses an AMD chipset, how difficult would it be to boot from the install CD, chroot into my Gentoo install, get my RAID1 arrays active then recompile my kernel with support built in for the new chipset?

Or would it just be a better idea to get a new motherboard that uses an Nvidia chipset?

Any advice would be great.

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## HeissFuss

What you said should work without problems, assuming that you're not changing actual CPU architecture.  If you compiled stuff for -march pentium4 and then move to an AMD processor, things won't work out quite right.

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## NeddySeagoon

johnisevil,

What sort of RAID1 ?

Hardware raid? fake raid ? (/dev/mapper/) or kernel raid?

Hardware raid and kernel raid will just work, you will need to build the kernel for the new motherboard.

fake (/dev/mapper/) raid needs the same chipset and same BIOS. As its raid1, you may be able to unpick it but its not recommended.

In this case, I would fix the motherboard to recover the raid, then never use fake raid again

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## mv

As long as the chipset is supported by the kernel it is almost no problem. I had to switch the motherboard for the same reason some weeks ago and did the same ( I switched from amd to an intel chipset and processor, but it should be the same more or less). I would recommend to use sysrescuecd instead of the install cd: You will have more tools available in case you have a basic binary which uses a special instruction (according to your CFLAGS) which does not run on the new processor. Moreover, it is more likely the sysrescuecd works with a current chipset.

However, I would check first whether sysrescuecd works with your raid - I have no experience with this.

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## johnisevil

 *NeddySeagoon wrote:*   

> johnisevil,
> 
> What sort of RAID1 ?
> 
> Hardware raid? fake raid ? (/dev/mapper/) or kernel raid?
> ...

 

I'm using regular ol' software/kernel RAID.  No LVM or anything.

I'm still going to be using the same architecture and no changes that will require me to have to rebuild my system because of use flags or CFLAGS changes.  I guess the main question that I forgot to ask initially was that since the current board is nForce based, I only included support for Nvidia based SATA.  Now if I go with an AMD chipset based, will Gentoo still just boot right up or will there be compatibility issues in seeing my SATA disks since my kernel only has NV support?

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## NeddySeagoon

johnisevil,

You will need to boot a liveCD to rebuild your kernel for your new motherboard but your kernel raid will be mounted ok when the kernel can talk to the drives.

The raid set contains the information to allow the kernel to assemble it correctly, even if you mix the drives up

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## johnisevil

 *NeddySeagoon wrote:*   

> johnisevil,
> 
> You will need to boot a liveCD to rebuild your kernel for your new motherboard but your kernel raid will be mounted ok when the kernel can talk to the drives.
> 
> The raid set contains the information to allow the kernel to assemble it correctly, even if you mix the drives up

 

So I should boot the install CD, load necessary drivers for the new hardware, bring up RAID1 devices, mount partitions, chroot into my Gentoo install, recompile kernel, reboot?

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## johnisevil

So I'm finally getting the new motherboard for my system and decided on the Biostar TA790GX XE.

Main specs:

Northbridge: AMD 790GX

Southbridge: AMD SB750

Video: ATI Radeon 3300

Now my question:

Coming from a system that was originally configured for an Nvidia chipset based motherboard, what would I need to enable in my kernel for SATA support, chipset support and networking?

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## NeddySeagoon

johnisevil,

We need to see your lspic output for the new board.

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